With social media morphing into adomineering beast over the years, young people are increasingly using it as something to hide behind, or worse, to exhibit apersonality that is in no way aligned with their true feelings and values. This couldn’t be more true in the case of Balthazar (Jaeden Martell), awealthy New York City teen who, night in, night out, basks in the sterile glow of his ring-light tripod. The moment the record button is pressed, he coaxes feigned tears and recites recycled words that ring hollow.
Amid adistinctly American school-shooter drill, he becomes enamoured of budding gun-reform advocate Eleanor (Pippa Knowles) and adjusts his content-making strategy to suit her ardour and sensibilities. Unsurprisingly, it is not her attention that this positioning attracts. Instead, adialogue ensues with amysterious user who claims to be planning aschool shooting. Convinced intervening will earn him hero status and the admiration of his crush, Balthazar hatches acatfishing scheme that finds him bound for Fort Worth, Texas.
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On the other side of the digital exchange is Solomon (Asa Butterfield), ayoung man who personifies the fringes of America. Caught in adesperate pursuit of connection, he strikes an agreement with his deadbeat father to become asalesman for his bogus alpha-male supplements brand. Their sour rapport reveals aless guarded register beneath his incel-coded online presence, exposing an almost childlike yearning not merely to be seen, but to be wanted too.
As luck would have it, Balthazar’s surprise arrival proves to be the makeshift answer to his prayers. To the privileged teen, Solomon’s trailer-park lifestyle feels like an entry into akind of uncharted fantasy realm. Social dramas often walk afine line between realism and imitation, and this debut feature from ex-Safdie brothers producer Oscar Boyson succeeds emphatically in regulating raw immediacy with perceptive dark comedy, under the logic that if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. The tightly constructed and progressively tense script unfolds like atale of two cities, probing the pressing parallels and divergences of contemporary youth.
The bait-and-switch between the script’s empathetic and scathing gaze allows ample space for the film’s cast to flourish, especially Butterfield, who is notably away from home turf here, delivering atransformative and profoundly complex performance following astring of more subdued roles. Balthazar and Solomon’s intertwined mythos settles into the sense that they are merely different threads in the same warped tapestry, leaving two enduring truths in its wake: fortune favours the rich and the kids are absolutely not allright.