THE MUDGE BOY
[] (three stars)
Unsettling drama. Running time: 94 minutes. Rated R (strong sexual content including graphic dialogue, a rape and language.) At the Quad, 13th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
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WRITER-director Michael Burke’s “The Mudge Boy” offers an idyllic, comforting surface of tree-shaded lanes and sunshine-dappled fields – but a disturbing tale throbs beneath.
Emile Hirsch (“The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys”) gives a brave, affecting performance as Duncan Mudge, a sensitive, awkward 14-year-old growing up on a farm as an only child.
Struggling to reconcile his mother’s sudden death, he dresses in her clothes and sleeps, eats and bicycles around with her favorite chicken.
“He’s a funny kid,” observes a farmhand, and that about sums up the town’s attitude toward the Mudge boy, whose eccentric reputation is cemented by his habit of calming his pet chicken by putting its entire head in his mouth.
His taciturn father, Edgar (Richard Jenkins), tries to shock the quirks out of him with tough love, and the beer-swilling metal-head town kids endlessly taunt him.
When Duncan strikes up an uneasy friendship with the town stud, Perry (Tom Guiry), a troubled youth whose father beats him mercilessly, his homosexuality is awakened – but it’s clear their relationship is going nowhere good.
Burke, who debuted his film at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, sustains a palpable sense of disquiet as he gently guides the story through its unpredictable arc, making the odd moments of brutality all the more shocking.