A smile for when life sucks

The thumbsucker in question is Justin Cobb (Lou Taylor Pucci): a teenage failure, diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and prescribed Ritalin.

It seems to do him good, since he surprisingly triumphs in the school debating team. But he's dimly aware that the drug is also doing something else, something he doesn't like. It's making him accept a society that scarcely deserves his approval.

Mike Mills's film seems to agree with him, and certainly disagrees with the prescribing of powerful drugs to the disordered young.

His mother and father (Tilda Swinton and Vincent D'Onofrio) are shown to be hopelessly frustrated by life, his teacher (Vince Vaughn) is a smooth fake and even his dentist (Keanu Reeves) is as mad as a hatter, trying to hypnotise him out of his sucking habit.

All these performances are good but Pucci's is better, and won him the Best Actor award at the Berlin Festival.

Thumbsucker is original and occasionally hilarious. But it suffers from a screenplay that places too heavy an emphasis on the deficiencies of the world in which our hero flounders.

It loads the dice too obviously in the young man's favour, instead of persuading us gently that he might have a point. As a coming-of-age movie, however, it is more audacious than most.

Thumbsucker
Cert: cert15