Easier with Practice

Easier with Practice

Directed by Kyle Michael Alvarez

Runtime: 100 min.

IN EASIER WITH PRACTICE, directorwriter Kyle Patrick Alvarez gets right at Davy Mitchell’s (Brian Geraghty) emotional issues by openly focusing on his lack of experience. As a short story writer on a cross-country book tour with his younger brother, Davy is like any number of contemporary semi-pros on public display before their lives have really developed.Think of all that amateur writing on the Internet where know-it-all-postures hide what is actually desperation to communicate.

Dealing with Davy’s rush to maturity makes Easier With Practice more than a story about a young man obsessed with a phone-sex relationship. Davy’s dilemma captures a classic emotional uncertainty many people know but that most movies avoid. It features a true shock of recognition.

That cutesy gimmick in Lars and the Real Girl (where Ryan Gosling fell in love with an inflatable doll) was the most abominable indie conceit, passing off psychopathology as quirky. It falsified the nature of human relationships in ways that indie apologists called “clever”—as if blatantly sentimentalizing sexual maladjustment resolved the problem. Lars and the Real Girl was Harvey for perverts, but Easier With Practice deals with circumstances as normal (or banal) as the spiritual distance in contemporary phone and Internet dating. Alvarez clarifies this modern crisis of intimacy; he breaks through the usual, awful, indie-maker’s arrogance (once known as mumblecore).

Alvarez does long, slow-dollying observations of Davy’s male sexual insecurity; even his music score, featuring one of those fey Belle and Sebastian tracks, avails itself of hypersensitivity as accepted in pop discourse.

This opens up our view of class and gender relations as no movie has since Q. Allan Brocka’s Boy Culture. Davy’s road trip takes him from the disorienting (meeting smalltown celebrity-seekers or his intense sibling rivalry during a party game) to uneasy familiarity, as in the film’s very moving conclusion.

What might seem gimmicky here is a logical consequence of Davy’s nature. Alvarez should have prepared for it with less indirection and but the payoff is powerful. Geraghty covers Alvarez’s miscalculation with a performance that uncannily evokes Brandon De Wilde’s coming-of-age gentleness and depth. In the 1960s films Hud and All Fall Down. De Wilde personified complex traits that Alvarez is free to make overt—and then expand to others, as in Eugene Byrd’s equally revelatory performance as Aaron. It’s all in their faces.

Alvarez’s sincere, probing look at male inexperience creates a modest but bold contrast to the age of snark. His shock of recognition is a humanist landmark.