The title character of “Our Hero, Balthazar” is no one’s idea of a hero. But he’s certainly a creature for our time. Balthazar, played in a hipster fade and with a puppy-dog scowl by Jaeden Martell, is a New York rich kid with a life coach and a divorced mother (Jennifer Ehle) who’s too busy throwing political cocktail parties to pay him much attention. They live in a Manhattan apartment decorated with expensive art, where Balthazar, known as Balthy, acts out his boredom by recording and posting videos of himself crying in the most tormented and “sincere” way. He can cry about anything, in sympathy with any victim. (The film is mostly focused on the victims of a school shooting.) But as we observe during his take-after-take recording process, the crying is entirely fake. Or, rather, it’s real (real sobs, real snot dripping out his nose), but it comes from a place that’s completely concocted. He’s acting how much he cares.
Kids at school have always cried over the tragic loss of a fellow student, and girls in the audience would weep as a ritual part of Beatlemania. But there has never been a youth crying culture like the one we have today, with kids regularly posting videos of themselves racked with sobs. It can be for almost any reason; last week, there were crying videos posted after the news broke that Taylor Swift had bought back her master tapes. Crying is supposed to be all about feeling, the emotions gushing forth like an undammed river, but it’s become the new showboating — an advertisement for how much you’re feeling, and maybe a form of one-upmanship. “Our Hero, Balthazar” captures how crying, for people of a certain generation, is now part of an online world where everything is performative. I act out my supremely empathic vulnerability, therefore I am.
“Our Hero, Balthazar” is the first movie directed by Oscar Boyson, who has been a close associate of Benny and Josh Safdie (he was one of the producers of “Uncut Gems” and “Good Time”), and it’s been made with some of the same dancing-on-the-precipice-without-a-net spirit that’s the Safdies’ calling card. It’s a cutting, audacious, and at times astonishing movie. Yet what makes it work is that Boyson, who cowrote the script with Ricky Camilleri, is truly onto something: the way a new, lost middle-class youth culture has come to value exhibitionism over reality — or, rather, has turned exhibitionism into its own reality.
Being able to cry on camera used to be one measure of an actor’s skill, but Jaeden Martell, known for the “It” films and “Knives Out,” does more than just cry. As Balthy, he cries in a particular way — raw and wrenched, expressive of an inner wound he can’t articulate, but one he knows he shares with countless others. They’re bonded, like a cult, by a pain too deep to speak its name. And the fact that Balthazar can summon all this as if it were his own private Method acting class is at once creepy and weirdly resonant. The movie might almost be asking: If this level of expression isn’t genuine, then what is?
At his private high school, a consulting company leads Balthy’s class in a training exercise designed to help students protect themselves from a school shooter. This gun-culture update of the ’50s “duck-and-cover” rituals is patently inappropriate, because it seems almost designed to stoke fear. (At one point the kids lie down on the floor with fake bloody bullet holes.) But it gives Balthy the chance to connect with the girl he has a crush on, Eleanor (Pippa Knowles), who’s brash enough to call out the training people for their clueless methods. But when she goes over to Balthy’s places and sees what he’s up to with his fake crying videos, she calls him out as a “fucking psycho.” Eleanor is played by Pippa Knowles with a playful, caustic vibrance that seizes the screen. This actor has a radiance — a spark of furious homespun sanity — that could take her far.
Balthazar, who never met an opportunity he couldn’t exploit, posts a crying video in sympathy with the victims of a school shooting that took place in Arkansas City. He gets many comments — and one of them comes from someone with the handle “deathdealer_16,” who claims to be a school shooter. Let’s leave aside the fact that school shooters never survive or evade capture. Balthazar starts exchanging messages with this phantom and convinces himself that he’s doing it to stop another massacre. But is that what he’s really up to? Or is it that this teenage expert of fake empathy believes, on some level, that he’s found his grisly soulmate?
The movie is about how he travels down to Fort Worth, Texas, to seek out his fellow lost boy, who turns out to be a tormented dude in his early 20s named Solomon (Asa Butterfield) who lives with his grandmother. “Our Hero, Balthazar” turns into a screw-loose buddy movie: “The Edgelord and the Incel.” And what makes it work is that as good in a cool-façade way as Jaeden Martell is, Asa Butterfield acts with a socio-bro attitude camouflaging a raw sorrow that seems to slice open the dark heart of what now drives so many lonely young men. Solomon is as much of a “psycho” as Balthy (he gets fired for harassing the young woman he works with at a roadside convenience store), yet Butterfield, the former child star of Scorsese’s “Hugo,” makes him sympathetic by letting the character’s tragedy shine through.
Solomon’s estranged roughneck father (Chris Bauer) hawks macho health supplements and scams Solomon into becoming one of his salesmen. At the same time, Solomon lures Balthy into the seductions of gun culture, at which point the film gets a little top-heavy with its own topicality. Yet Boyson shoots it all in a style of threadbare realism that draws you into the central relationship. Is Solomon really a potential school shooter? No. But that’s what he dreams of being, even as Balthy dreams of caring for the victims of one of those massacres. They are two sides of the same coin — paragons of a virtual youth culture gone nuts.
