Film

Warhol assembled a baker’s dozen of his screen tests and called it The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys. Gus Van Sant could attempt a similar exercise: Several Films with Beautiful Boys Haunted by Death. Fracturing Blake Nelson’s fine YA novel but remaining true to the source, Van Sant has created his most compassionate film about a lost boy since My Own Private Idaho.

Alex (Nevins), a middle-class teen skater in Portland, Oregon, leaves his soon-to-be-broken home and hops a freight train with a tougher, older kid. He inadvertently causes the horrific death of a security guard, who is sliced in two. This unforgettable scene is just one of many in a film bursting with incredible visuals (provided by cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Kathy Li): Super-8 footage of skaters and tracking shots down public-school corridors—this time, unlike similar moments in Elephant, fixed on Nevins’s delicate face (not the back of his head).

That face tries not to betray immense guilt. Nevins, found, like most of the cast, via MySpace, is more like a Bressonian “model” given to monosyllables. He’s not so much fetishized, as the young killers of Elephant were to a distracting degree, but caressed and cared for by the camera. And where Elephant was marred by sexism (remember the girls puking up their lunch?), Alex finds his most understanding ally in his neighbor Macy (McKinney). “The little problems—they’re just all so stupid,” Alex says. “Not if they’re happening to you,” replies Macy—here, it seems, speaking for the director himself.