BOYS GONE WILD
Nick Cassavetes’ Alpha Dog, a drug-and-debauchery-fueled realm in which kids aree king, is anything but child’s play. Karen Durbin Reviews
“Kids have more power than they did before,” director Nick Cassavetes told The New York Times recently. “They have cars, they can get around, they have dough, and there’s always some person that’s got something going on that can get everybody killed.” In Alpha Dog, Cassavetes’ uncommonly gripping new movie, a 20-year-old Southern California pot dealer is that person, and while one kid gets killed, his death could hardly be more terrible. Alpha Dog is based on the true story of Jesse James Hollywood, who in 2000 because one of the youngest people on the FBI’s most-wanted list after allegedly ordering the abduction and murder of the teenage brother of a drug dealer who stiffed him for $1,200. Discovered in Brazil and deported last March, Hollywood is expected to stand trial in Santa Barbara later this year. Called Johnny Truelove in the film, he’s played with impressive hardness by Emile Hirsch. But while Alpha Dog hews closely to the facts of the case, it’s less about Truelove than about the wholly preventable death of a 15-year-old. Cassavetes has made a riveting bad boy saga, but what makes the movie matter is the way that he maps a culture to locate the moment when self-indulgence mutates into depravity.
Truelove rules his posse of street dealers and gofers with a ruthless machismo. Although they all live in the same upscale suburb and went to an elite high school, they strike a tough guy pose—his sweet-natured main man, Frankie (Justin Timberlake), sports prison-style tattoos and a skinhead buzz cut. In some cases, the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree: Trueloves father (a brutishly smug Bruce Willis) is a dealer himself, while Frankie’s dad (Chris Kinkade) is a rich, amiable boozer. The parents who most fit the uptight suburban mold are the Mazursky’s, father (David Thornton) and stepmother (Sharon Stone) of the furious, coked-up Jake (Ben Foster).
Alpha Dog encompasses some of the best work Cassavetes has ever done. It’s marred, though, by cinematic clutter like split screens and pseudodocumentary interviews that break flow. But when he keeps things simple, Cassavetes is a great storyteller and, as he showed in his last film, The Notebook (2004), he gets extraordinary from his actors. Foster, who threw amusing hissy fits as Claire’s bisexual boyfriend in Six Feet Under, is electrifying here, stoked on rage, flaming the world from his own private hell. At the other end of the spectrum, Timerlake hits all the right subtle notes as that woeful creature, a weak, good-hearted man. Because Frankie seems basically decent, he becomes Zack’s—and our—last hope. At a critical moment, he tells the frightened teen, “I’m your boy.” But he isn’t. He’s his Judas. In the bleak moral landscape of Alpha Dog, self-interest trumps decency every time.