Movie Log: Rocket Science

Rocket Science is a movie about a stammering teenage boy in New Jersey who joins a debate club; the New Jersey connection and the similarity to Thumbsucker were enough to intrigue me and get me to see it.

Rocket Science is aggressively independent; a couple of actors looked vaguely familiar (and Jonah Hill shows up in a very minor role), but it's mostly made up of very high-school-looking unknowns acting naturalistically through a script that strenuously avoids doing anything obvious.

This is another movie that I saw and then didn't bother to write about for a couple of weeks -- mostly because what I have to say boils down to "decent indy dramedy, a low-key story about characters that's worth seeing if you like that sort of thing."

Oh, one other thing: if you like the Violent Femmes (particularly their first album), you need to see Rocket Science, since a couple of songs are used very well here. Of course, that raises the question of when this movie takes place -- it could be anywhere between 1982 or 2006, as far as I can tell -- but that's not terribly important. It did make me wonder, though, and it might confuse or put off current teenagers.