The Mudge Boy exemplifies a distinct strain of American independent film that can rightly be called The Sundance School, especially since the movie itself is a product of Robert Redford's venerable festival. It's based on a Sundance Award-winning short film, its script was developed in the Sundance Institute's Filmmakers Lab, and it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at last year's festival. (How's that for incestuous?) It's the kind of film whose superb performances, gorgeous cinematography, likable sensitivity, and masterful grasp of an oft-overlooked milieu wows 'em at festivals, but whose deliberate pacing and esoteric subject matter cause it to be politely ignored by everyone else.
The Mudge Boy is the sort of cinematic health food that makes moviegoers feel better about themselves for consuming it, but that doesn't make it bad. The film stars Emile Hirsch—who underwent a different kind of sexual awakening in this year's The Girl Next Door—as a painfully earnest farm boy so starved for attention and affection that his most loving relationship seems to be with his pet chicken.
Hirsch's sensitivity, slender frame, chicken-loving ways, and all-around geekiness alienate him from both his stone-faced widower father (Richard Jenkins) and his small-town peers, who dull the boredom and isolation of small-town life with booze and promiscuity. Hirsch nevertheless develops an unlikely friendship with the town stud (Tom Guiry) that develops uneasily into something more.
An auspicious debut for writer-director Michael Burke, the film makes a superb actor's showcase for Hirsch as well as Guiry, who subtly and skillfully illustrates how his developing attraction to Hirsch is fed by his own sexual narcissism. Guiry already considers himself a consummate ladies' man, so it's not a stretch for him to imagine that another gender would also find him physically irresistible. (It doesn't hurt that Hirsch is prettier than his ostensible girlfriend.)
The Mudge Boy rings false only during its climax, which closes the proceedings too neatly with clunky symbolism that's as strained as the rest of the film is organic and convincing. Otherwise, Burke's meticulously observed debut may be an unabashed student of the now-familiar Sundance School, but it's a prize pupil.