As a child actor, Owen Kline played Jesse Eisenberg’s kid brother in The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach’s excruciating comedy about a middle-class New York family wrecked by divorce, with Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney as the warring parents. Kline played the troubled 12-year-old kid who sympathises with his mother and has developed a habit of covertly masturbating in public.
His debut feature as a director features many of the same unwholesome themes. This is a genuinely bizarre, startling, freewheelingly lo-fi and funny indie picture with the refreshing bad-taste impact of Todd Solondz or Robert Crumb. Daniel Zolghadri plays Robert, a talented high-school graphic artist and cartoonist who idolises his art teacher – the man that might, very possibly, have been about to abuse him sexually before fate took a terrible hand.
