He's a pariah at high school, until three artsy friends decide Dahmer's soulless stares and odd mannerisms are kind of cool crazy. To escape, Jeffrey spends time in a shed, dipping road-kill into acid because he likes bones. His mother (Anne Heche) is mentally unhinged, and his dad (Dallas Roberts) has checked out. Growing up in a middle-class suburb of Akron, Ohio, Dahmer's family looks "normal" on the outside, but is a dysfunctional mess inside. My Friend Dahmer, written and directed by Marc Meyers, introduces us to Jeffrey Dahmer (Ross Lynch), a lonely, awkward teenager on the cusp of becoming a deeply sadistic man.
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His friendship with Dahmer was never to be consummated.Think of it as portrait of a cannibalistic serial killer as a high-school senior. Derf himself never quite faces up to what he has arguably done, although there is a cold-sweat moment when it looks as if he will receive the serial-killer version of poetic justice. The film bears the traces of its graphic-novel origin in the black-comic foregrounding of faces, characters, situations marooned in ennui and dismay. Meanwhile, Jeff cultivates his own obsession with animal cruelty and with stalking the town doctor (Vincent Kartheiser) who jogs past his house every other day.Īs ever, it is high school that is the theatre of cruelty, an arena of fear and harm and an unforgettably important place where, for many, life itself is real in a way it will never be again. “We eat our mistakes,” she says cheerily – an unfortunate motto, considering her son’s later adventures in cannibalism – and she will later hurt Jeff’s feelings during the divorce proceedings by appearing to argue that she should be given custody of his younger brother Dave (Liam Koeth) while not caring about Jeff. Anne Heche is hilarious as Jeff’s boozy, unstable mother who is a terrible cook and insists the family eat her calamitous dishes as a learning experience. He has a shed out in the yard for dissolving roadkill animals in acid, a preoccupation very much disapproved of by his dad Lionel (Dallas Roberts) who nonetheless senses that Jeff may have inherited this obsessional quality from him. Ross Lynch is eerily good as Dahmer, like a very young Philip Seymour Hoffman – stolidly silent, heavy-footed, incubating his resentments. School becomes a theatre of cruelty … My Friend Dahmer. They kept him around as their mascot and cartoon muse, laughing sort-of with him and sort-of at him. This film shows how Derf (Alex Wolff) and his cool-outsider nerd friends cruelly took up the unhappy and lonely weirdo Dahmer (Ross Lynch), entranced by his loser glasses, short-sleeved shirts and intensively laundered blue jeans.
My Friend Dahmer is based on the 2012 autobiographical graphic novel by cartoonist John “Derf” Backderf, all about his true-life, high-school acquaintance with Dahmer, who was later to become one of the nation’s most notorious serial murderers. But this brings Dahmer closer to America’s current zeitgeist than is comfortable: our world of Donald Trump impersonating the disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski. In real life, Dahmer only got to watch Mondale working and didn’t actually speak to him.
What sort of a creep mocks people with a physical disability do you imagine? And what sort of a community rewards such a creep with anti-establishment hero status? The film shows the teenage Dahmer going on a school trip to Washington DC, entering the White House and meeting the vice-president, Walter Mondale. It’s about the teenage years of Jeffrey Dahmer in the 1970s and especially his high-school penchant for pretending to have epileptic fits – to the hilarity of his nasty and fickle friends. T he Childhood of a Serial Killer could be an alternative title for this queasily gripping movie from writer-director Marc Meyers.