Our Hero, Balthazar
In New York City, teenaged Balthy Malone (Jaeden Martell, "It," "Knives Out") responds to high school shootings with performative crying videos, but cannot pry his socialite mom Nicole's (Jennifer Ehle, TV's 'The Vampire Lestat') attention away from the pro-gun control candidate she's attracted to and campaigning for. He forms an online friendship with a purported school shooter online and when his mom leaves his birthday celebration to his life coach Anthony (Noah Centineo), he decides to travel to Texas, baiting Solomon Jackson (Asa Butterfield, "Hugo," "Ender's Game") with a fake female persona in order to befriend him in "Our Hero, Balthazar."
Laura's Review: B
Cowriter (with Ricky Camilleri)/director Oscar Boyson makes his feature debut in what's being described as a dark comedy, but is more of a pitch black satire with two cannily cast former child stars. Martell's character has something akin to Bud Cort's Harold, his innocent face masking the manipulative ways he tries to get attention and Butterfield is unrecognizable as the gun-loving Texas incel.
It is that latter qualifier that Balthy uses to catfish Solomon with female persona, feeding his own mother's voice into his computer when Solomon expresses a desire to hear her. Balthy also briefly gains the attention of a scholarship student, Eleanor (Pippa Knowles), at his pricy public school when he embraces her gun control protest, but when he uses the security camera footage of an Arkansas school shooting Solomon sent him as a seduction ploy, she flees in disgust. After deploying his instantaneous tears in front of Anthony's friends and accusing him of rape, Balthy high tails it to Texas and finds Solomon at the bus station awaiting the woman he created. Balthy introduces himself with an explanation for her absence, but it doesn't take Solomon long to ferret out the lie. The hirsute Texan veers between pacifism and rage, shaking Balthy's confidence, but when he tells Solomon he 'only wanted to be his friend,' having flown from New York City to do so, Solomon calms down viewing Balthy as a friend trophy to be exhibited.
Boyson then switches gears getting into Solomon's background and while he is at the opposite end of the economic strata, living with his disabled grandmother Elaine (Becky Ann Baker, "Tow") in a trailer park that just announced a rent increase he cannot afford, he is also desperately trying to gain the attention of a parent. His dad, Beaver (Chris Bauer, TV's 'True Blood,' "Maddie's Secret"), is a former porn actor turned Thrush testosterone supplement salesman whose only interest in his son is as product purchaser in his pyramid sales scheme. And so Balthy gets to look at the blueprints for a school shooting and learns to shoot various guns while Solomon gets someone willing to place a huge order after his sales campaign went nowhere.
Boyson does a great job of contrast, Balthy driven around Manhattan, living in an apartment with what Eleanor calls a '$50 million view' and having no concept of money while Solomon drives an old VW Rabbit convertible, is panicking over his lack of cash and lives in a cramped trailer (when introduced to Solomon's grandmother and told they'll probably have to find somewhere else to live, Balthy replies 'Oh nice, you can buy a real house'). But the similarities are strong, Solomon also having driven away a girl he's attracted to, the coworker at Pump and Go, Taylor (Anna Baryshnikov, "Love Lies Bleeding"), whose complaint helps get him fired. What's so clever about Camilleri and Boyson's screenplay is that neither Balthy nor Solomon really has what the other is looking for, despite outward appearances, and that contradiction makes the film go to unexpected places.
To say more would spoil the surprises in store, but both Martell and Butterfield are impressive as they turn their outward personae inside out. Ehle is fun as the superficial socialite while Bauer is just plain hissable as Beaver. The film also features Avan Jogia as Supes, Beaver's right hand man and enforcer.
"Our Hero, Balthazar" gives us the ending the story requires, if not a morally satisfying one. This is a thought provoking debut that also signals smooth transitions into adult roles for Martell and Butterfield.
On 8/11/26, "Our Hero Balthazar" is available for digital purchase and rental from WG Pictures and Radial Entertainment.
