Rebel in the Rye

Since J.D. Salinger repeatedly refused to allow The Catcher in the Rye to be adapted into a movie, filmmaker Danny Strong decided to dramatize the story of how and why this literary classic was written. Based on Kenneth Slawenski's 2010 biography J.D. Salinger: A Life, the film asserts not only that Holden Caulfield was Salinger's alter ego but also that Oona O'Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill, was the inspiration for Sally Hayes. When he was 22, Jerome David Salinger (Nicholas Hoult) fell madly in love with then-16-year-old Oona (Zoey Deutch), but Oona played coy with many suitors, including Orson Welles and cartoonist Peter Arno. Salinger persisted and Oona promised to wait for him when he went off to fight in WWII. So when Salinger read in the newspaper that she'd married 53-year-old Charlie Chaplin, he was devastated. Dispatched to Europe just in time for D-Day, Salinger was permanently scarred by the brutality he witnessed, suffering what we now know as PTSD. Nevertheless, encouraged by his agent (Sarah Paulson), he kept working on his classic 1951 novel about poignant adolescent angst (translated into 30 languages, it has sold 65 million copies and continues to sell 250,000 copies a year). Supported by his mother (Hope Davis) but thwarted by his critical father (Victor Garber), Salinger studied creative writing at Columbia under Whit Burnett (Kevin Spacey), who became his mentor. Married three times, he eventually chose a reclusive life of Zen Buddhism and meditation, isolated in the Cornish, NH, woods until his death in 2010. Unfortunately, the essence of Salinger still remains elusive in this middling film. Optional. (S. Granger)