Impaired Down

Chris Pratt is a severely troubled young man. When he's asked to write an essay about a typical day, he can't get past "I wake up." He continually locks his keys in his car (thankfully, he carries a spare in his shoe) and he can't get past a fatal car accident he caused four years ago. Chris was driving. His friends died. He went into a coma and, as one character notes, he came out of it a "different person". All this has the makings of a self-conscious "indie" movie, but a smart script by Scott Frank ("Out of Sight", "Get Shorty") and a riveting performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt make "The Lookout" an engrossing study of a deeply damaged small town boy.

The tiny town of Noel, Kansas, where a majority of the action takes place, appears cold and nearly empty. Chris drifts from his obsessively ordered apartment, where he lives with an eccentric blind man (Jeff Daniels, in a nicely restrained performance) to his dead-end job cleaning a bank after-hours. One night at a local bar (called "The Local"), Chris runs into an old high school acquaintance, Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode). As Gary slowly coaxes Chris out of his shell, he seems to know a lot more about Chris than he should. It soon becomes clear that Gary is interested in more than Chris' friendship.

This is Mr. Frank's directorial debut and he translates his own delicately-written script to the screen with a sure-hand. Chris is undeniably ill, but the key to the script is that it's never made clear exactly how damaged Chris is. At times he appears to be another Leonard Shelby from "Memento"; he must write down the simplest details of his life lest he forget them. He asks a lovely woman, named Luvlee (Isla Fisher, embracing her inner ditz), to repeat her name multiple times. As Chris gets deeper into Gary's plot to rob the local bank, it's captivating to see how and if Chris will rise to the challenge.

"The Lookout" owes a lot to Mr. Gordon-Levitt. The actor has come a long way since "3rd Rock from the Sun" and he has a habit of rising above his material (the neo-noir "Brick" comes to mind). The film, while well-written, is a character study. It's about a scarred young man battling interior demons while trying to overcome exterior ones. It's a plot that's been done before, and you can see the ending coming from a country mile away, but that's forgivable since we're rooting for Chris the whole time. One thing's for sure, Mr. Gordon-Levitt has a fine career ahead of him. That's something to lookout for.