The United States of Leland (2003)

Summary: Although he can't remember it, Leland P. Fitzgerald (Ryan Gosling) is in a juvenile hall for killing another young boy, the brother of his ex-girlfriend, Becky (Jena Malone). Pearl Madison (Don Cheadle), his teacher there, smells a book in this quiet, asocial teen, and he visits with Leland's father, the great author Albert T. Fitzgerald (Kevin Spacey), to find it.

There are other plot lines about the family of the young boy, but I don't feel like writing about them.

Not recommended for those who have difficulty following plots that jump around in time.

Ryan Gosling, ladies and gentlemen. Ryan Frickin' Gosling. For those of us who watched Breaker High or, yes, it's true, Young Hercules, we so did not see this one coming. Not in the slightest. And then, poof, Murder by Numbers. At least that's how it was for me. He was magnetic and dangerous and unlike anything I expected of him.

And now . . . he's shaping up to be one of the best character actors of my generation. A complete transformation from last year's The Notebook to this movie, including physically. There he pulled off looking like a grown man, but here he possesses all the innocence and pain of a twelve year old. It was stunning. Leland came across as gentle and kind of apathetic, but the absolute torment he possessed is pricking my eyes with tears as I write this.

I like that Malone. She's sweet and trouble all at the same time. I'm a little worried that those are the only two characters she can play, but I'm going to wait until she's older to make that call. After all, the roles out there for teen girls are incredibly limited. Even more so than for teen boys, I would say.

Cheadle is something closer to a conduit than an actor. He's very reserved in his performances, and he makes his co-stars glow without reducing his own brilliance.

I only wish that Spacey could have shared some scenes with Gosling. I would have liked to see that. Nonetheless, this is the kind of character Spacey was born to play. A smarmy asshole who cares for naught but himself. Only he does care, maybe too much, and his desire to cut himself off from those feelings cuts deeper than he realized. Perhaps the true measure of this performer was that I got all that from about 20 mins on screen.

I'm going to go ahead and mention Chris Klein at this point. I have always thought very little of him and, while only one year older than Gosling, looks way too old to be playing a high school boy. But he wasn't awful here. I will say that.

For Matthew Ryan Hoge's (writer/director) second time out of the gate, it's not bad. It's actually very good but not quite as good as it thinks it is. I may have a different opinion about the level of pretention this movie possesses if I had watched it straight through, but I had some where I had to be.

Hoge has something there, though. He had a lot of high calibre actors here, but they wouldn't have come together the way they did if not for his direction. I'd like to see where he's going to go next. A-