Butler's Cinema Scene

Ross Lynch (center) as future serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer

“MY FRIEND DAHMER”  My rating: B

107 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Right off the bat, the title “My Friend Dahmer” puts potential audiences on edge.

After all, Jeffrey Dahmer was one of our more notorious serial killers of the last 50 years. Between 1978 and 1991 he murdered 17 men and boys, often preserving their bones and feasting on their flesh. He was beaten to death in prison in 1994.

The obvious question: What’s the take of writer/director Marc Meyers’ film?  Is it a blood-soaked bit of gross-out exploitation? A black comedy?

In truth “My Friend Dahmer” is a smart, insightful and disturbing study of the killer’s high school years.  Based on the graphic novel by John Backderf, Dahmer’s classmate and one of the few who paid the dead-eyed loner any attention, it’s both creepy and sad.

From almost the first frame of this film we understand that Jeff, played by Disney discovery Ross Lynch (“Austin & Ally,” “Teen Beach Movie”), has issues. In a shack in the woods behind his family’s semi-rural Ohio home he keeps jars in which dead  animals are slowly dissolving in acid solution. He always keeps a black plastic garbage bag in his pocket, lest he stumble across an intriguing bit of road kill.

“I like bones,” he explains. “It interests me — what’s inside.”

Gawky and outwardly unemotional, Jeff is a target for school bullies. Not that things are much better at home.

Mom (Anne Heche) is a former mental patient who lives life in just two speeds: fetal and combative. Her depression and raw emotions prove unbearable to her decent but  ineffectual husband (Dallas Roberts). At least Jeff’s father, himself the victim of a solitary  childhood, recognizes his oldest son’s plight and urges the kid to try to fit in.

Jeff’s plan to win his classmates’ attention is typically bizarre and tone-deaf.  He begins staging fake epileptic fits in the school hallways. His arm-flapping, screeching antics draw the attention of John Backderf (Alex Wolff) and a small coterie of social outsiders who adopt Jeff as their mascot.

“I think with you as our fearless leader we can really disrupt this school,” John tells Jeff.

“Let’s do a Dahmer,”  becomes their rebellious battle cry before each new example of perverse performance art.

One of their cleverer ploys is to have Jeff, who has dropped out of all extracurricular activities, crash the yearbook photos of every one of the school’s various clubs.

At home he boasts: “Hey, Dad.  I’ve joined a lot of new clubs. I think you’d be proud.”

There’s some incredibly weird stuff here, not the least of which is a field trip to Washington D.C. where Jeff, posing as a student journalist, phones the White House and lands a meeting for his group with Vice President Walter Mondale.

But is Jeff actually friends with these guys? Or are they just using him? Jeff’s increasing reliance on liquor suggests he knows the score.

And then there’s the growing realization that he’s gay.  Fascinated by a bearded jogger (Vincent Kartheiser) who trots by his house three days a week, Jeff lays in wait to catch a glimpse of this homoerotic fantasy.  On one occasion he brings along a baseball bat.

“My Friend Dahmer” ends just before Jeff begins his long killing spree.  But our knowledge of the monster he will become permeates every minute of the film.

What’s truly remarkable, then, is how close Meyers’ film comes to being sympathetic to Jeffrey Dahmer. Part of that is Lynch’s performance — though he rarely shows much emotion here, the actor is handsome and compelling on a simple physical basis.

You leave the movie pretty much convinced that Jeffrey Dahmer never had a chance to be anything but a blank-faced fiend.  Between nature and nurture he was always a lost cause.

| Robert W. Butler