Zephyr Benson, son of actor-director Robby Benson, pulled off the proverbial Orson Welles with this 2015 feature debut, writing-directing-starring (his mother, vocalist Karla DeVito, produced). If the resulting New York City drug drama isn't Citizen Kane, it's still got a sense of the newcomer giving everything he's got. Which is good in some ways, less so in others.
A fair lookalike for his father, Benson plays Gene, a 17-year-old (the thespian/filmmaker is just youthful-looking enough to pull that off) proud Manhattanite, who has been virtually abandoned by a wealthy, widowed businessman-father off starting afresh with a new wife and child. Gene, plenty streetwise, falls into drug use, and because his affluent Jewish background and educated manner does not fit the typical user profile, his mischief breezes past police.
The only other thing Gene cares about besides intoxicants and pleasing his absentee dad is baseball; his pitching athleticism gains him entrance to a posh school, despite the drug habit and dodgy associations. Latter includes an upscale-yuppie-type drug kingpin (Aaron Costa Ganis) who gets outraged at porpoise slaughters on TV, and who hires Gene to peddle marijuana to his classmates. A network of pretty girls launders the money. But Gene's addiction spirals, and things get dark and serious - deadly so.
Wild mood-shifty tones make Gene's drug capers seem sometimes into a Holden Caulfield-like rebellion against his situation, school and stuffy social pretensions; other times it's a plunge into junkie horror and kids way in over their heads in crime. Benson insists on generously giving even bit players (an uncredited Whoopi Goldberg in one cameo) the most scene-stealing and scenery-chewing dialogue he can write, a Tarantino-esque touch that makes for scattered memorable scenes but is wearying over the long haul. A "how's-that-again?" finale seems to offer the viewer a choice of endings over Gene's dire addiction spiral - including the possibility that much of the plot only happened in his imagination, maybe, we think.
Violence is brief and vivid, profanity is present, though nudity is absent, and sexual content doesn't go to Requiem for a Dream extremes. An optional addition to mainstream movie/dramatic collections, and potentially worth a listing for institutions compiling addiction recovery dramatizations.