Rocket Science

And you wondered where a filmmaker could go after making an Oscar-nominated documentary about spelling bees. Rocket Science is Jeffrey Blitz’s answer. Like Spellbound, writer-director Blitz’s new film luxuriates in a love of language and a warm-hearted fascination with youngsters in competition. But, the latter effort being fiction—and hardly history’s first sympathetic movie about nerdy, striving adolescents—Blitz knew he’d need a good hook. Hence, Hal Hefner (Reece Daniel Thompson), the bright but confused kid with the conversation-halting stutter, who joins the debate team in hopes of finding love and his own voice. You can’t blame him for crushing on the girl (Anna Kendrick) who recruited him by arguing that “deformed people are the best.” Like Hal, Blitz is learning to trust his voice; so far he seems equally attuned to wistfulness and whimsy, and very much at home in the comically absurd savageries of adolescence. Plus, the debate scenes sometimes even play like the breakneck banter of vintage Howard Hawks.