The Reeler braved the rain Monday night to check out the premiere and party for L.I.E. director Michael Cuesta’s latest film Twelve and Holding at IFC Center. The usual IFC gang was all there, including unofficial IFC Films mascot Michael Stipe (right, with Cuesta*), who followed March’s Lonesome Jim party-crash with last night’s late arrival. (Not coincidentally, I guess, REM also contributed to the film’s soundtrack.) The lovely Annabella Sciorra held court in a far corner of the room, while word of a few Willem Dafoe sightings preceded the film. I never saw him myself; he seemed to have fled the scene before a biblical-style storm besieged the white tent under which partygoers feasted on wine and cheese and–wait for it–chips, salsa and guacamole.
Anyway, the event was a rollicking success even if the film is a tad disappointing. In telling the story of three New Jersey adolescents facing a set of peculiarly traumatic growing pains, Cuesta coaxes excellent performances (including one astonishing turn by Zoe Weizenbaum) from a cast that had not a whole bunch to work with script-wise. The film is essentially melodrama refracted through the more harrowing challenges of youth: obese Leonard (Jesse Camacho) whose sudden obsession with healthy living verges on neurosis; Malee (Weizenbaum), an Asian girl whose budding sexuality homes in on one of her psychiatrist mother’s patients (Jeremy Renner); and Jacob (Conor Donovan), born with a facial birth mark, haunted by his twin brother’s death.
Everybody looks different here and is treated as such, and they take increasingly drastic measures to fill emotional gulfs widened by their parents and their peers. But a first act portending hard realities gives way to second and third acts that are more troubling for their contrivances than for their characters’ predicaments; only Malee, unable to reconcile sexual and paternal alienation, resonates with any lingering influence. “She’s a lonely girl,” the patient tells her mother, defining a simple reality less abstract than those that screenwriter Anthony Cipriano saddles Leonard and Jacob with. Cipriano’s determination to save his characters achieves full-blown pathology in Twelve and Holding‘s final 10 minutes, and you really cannot help but feel for Cuesta and his cast, whose restraint is no match for a particularly fearsome deus ex machina.

But enough of that. Cuesta, whose son attends the same Locust Alley school as IFC Films boss Jonathan Sehring’s son (Sehring evidently asked the 10-year-old to “please tell your father we want to buy his film” at a school fair), absolutely has a way with young actors; it was abundantly clear with L.I.E.‘s Paul Franklin Dano and it carries over to his Twelve and Holding trio. “Everybody asks about that, but it’s not as hard as you think,” he told me, referring to the process of working through such tough material with kids. “They read the script. Their parents read the script. They had a discussion with their parents beforehand. These kids came in prepped by their parents; it was clear that their parents were really involved and were really great. Then I think they saw in me–and maybe in the way I handled difficult material in my first film–that I was going to kind of look out for their kids. I wasn’t going to be exploitive or sensationalize it in any way. And with all that, it’s basically just letting the kids be who they are. They don’t have a lot of acting training. You capture that and guide that.”
I also caught up with Weizenbaum, whose precocity and chops dazzled Cuesta within 20 seconds of him watching her audition tape. Now 14 years old, she told me she left camp suddenly (“Farm and wilderness,” she said. “It was a Quaker camp.”) to lock down the role. “People ask me what I draw upon when I’m doing something like what I did,” she said. “It’s a hard question to answer. I think that all the issues that come up in the film, someone can relate to out there: Body image, sexuality, violent feelings–it’s what every teenager kind of goes through. And I think that being a teenager, that’s what I drew from. Those emotions. Just not necessarily to that extreme.” She also praised her director. “Michael is amazing,” she told me. “For some reason he can do teenage angst really well. I don’t know. He really understood all the characters and he said where things were going. He was very focused and serious.”
And once again, it shows–at least as much as it can before the story sabotages him. But that is OK; revelations are few and far between, and I will take them where I can get them.
* Pardon the fuzzy resolution, but my camera decided to stop working before the event and I fell back on the trusty cell phone camera. Embarrassing, yes, but we do what we have to do.

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