Twelve and Holding

Directed by Michael Cuesta

Michael Cuesta has what Truffaut called an “idée fixe.” He's stuck on recreating adolescent trauma, examining that period when sex and social rules don't come together satisfactorily. Cuesta's new movie, Twelve and Holding, follows three suburban kids in crisis: Jacob (Conor Donovan) carries guilt from his twin brother's death, Malee (Zoe Weizenbaum) enters puberty after her parents divorce, and Leonard (Jesse Camacho) battles insecurity brought on by his obese family's eating disorder. 

These case studies are presented in the dour-sensationalist style of Cuesta's debut film,  L.I.E., where a lonely teenager looked for affection in the danger zones of petty crime and pedophilia. There, Cuesta's risk paid off in scenes where his characters' desperation achieved genuine, almost lyrical, pathos. Here, except for the adult aftershock expressed by Jeremy Renner as the ex-fireman who becomes the object of Malee's menarcheal crush, Cuesta's desperation stuns, but offers no revelation. (This limited vision of baffled youth won't do after Garcon Stupide and My Life on Ice.)

Cuesta's title, Twelve and Holding, suggests arrested development. He can't get over teenage confusion, and this gloomy concentration comes awfully close to the morbid freak show of Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, with its sickening exhibitions of sexual self-hatred. Todd Solondz has become the modern master of these suburban miseries, but always with a cleansing, humanizing sense of satire. Solondz helps put our personal and social outrage about adolescent trauma in helpful perspective.

It's also helpful that Cuesta's grim idée fixe can now be contrasted to Criterion's vivid new restoration of Truffaut's 1959 debut film, The 400 Blows, still the ranking portrait of adolescent trauma—and the liveliest. Little Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) was Truffaut's alter ego whose private neuroses would anchor Truffaut's worldview in youth's curiosity, affection and vulnerability. Cuesta, take notes.