Festival Hit 'Thumbsucker' Comes to NY and LA on Friday

Mike Mills's indie adaptation of Walter Kirn's 1999 novel Thumbsucker, which screened in competition yesterday at the Toronto Film Festival, goes into limited release on Friday. The film is a suburban melodrama that chronicles the efforts of a 17-year-old, played by Lou Taylor Pucci, to quit sucking his thumb.

Pucci, a relative newcomer whose highest-profile work to date was in the Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward HBO miniseries Empire Falls (adapted from Richard Russo's novel), won the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic performance at the Sundance Film Festival in January and the Silver Berlin Bear award for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. It was at Sundance this year that Sony Pictures Classics acquired the North American rights (plus English-speaking territories) for Thumbsucker. Story continues below ?

While Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter, a sister publication of The Book Standard and Kirkus Reviews, acknowledged in his review that Mills "has delivered a film that looks as polished as a studio production," he added, "whether actor power can sell this dramatically tepid movie to adult audiences in art-house venues is a real question." That test should come Friday, when Thumbsucker opens in New York and Los Angeles, along with the nationwide releases of the Liev Schreiber–helmed adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything Is Illuminated (starring Elijah Wood) and Tim Burton's animated feature Corpse Bride (voiced by Burton fave Johnny Depp).

In an interview published last week at Salon.com, Mills described being "scared shitless" when he met Kirn, whose novel was deemed by Kirkus Reviews, in 1999, as "one of the year's most charming books."

In addition to his young lead, Mills assembled an impressive cast that includes Tilda Swinton and Vincent D'Onofrio as Justin's concerned parents, Vince Vaughn as his high-school debate coach, and Keanu Reeves as a new-age orthodontist, who describes the eponymous character as "the King Kong of oral obsessive."