Edinburgh film festival review: Hellion

Like a lot of TV actors coming off a landmark show, Aaron Paul has been trying to find his feet as a movie actor, capitalising on the new opportunities his increasingly soul-wrenching performance as Jessie Pinkman in Breaking Bad have afforded him with a combination of leading man roles in ropey mainstream vehicles (Need for Speed, Long Way Down) and more satisfying parts in indie films, like 2012’s Smashed.

Aaron Paul plays a widowed father of two boys

Hellion - Cineworld, Edinburgh

* * *

Hellion falls squarely into the second category, and provides him with his best big screen role to date as a young widowed father not coping with having to raise two boys by himself.

Bringing the raw, in-the-moment authenticity to the role, he helps ground a film that occasionally seems to be working against him by telegraphing the beats of his emotional journey when really all it needs to do is hold on Paul’s weary and panicked eyes to let us see how much his character, Hollis, is hurting.

Paul does most of the dramatic heavy lifting here, and he’s complemented by Juliette Lewis in a smaller role as his older sister, whose own status as her nephews’ reluctant standby caregiver soon threatens to tear this fractured family further apart.

What lets Kat Candler’s film down a little is how rote if feels as a whole. Hellion’s focus is really Hollis’s 13-year-old son Jacob (Josh Wiggins), a latchkey kid, simmering with rage and on a direct path to juvenile hall. He runs with a crew of similarly damaged adolescents who listen to speed metal, go on casual vandalism sprees and are easily provoked into violence.

None of them feel particularly authentic – mostly they just seem like a collection of character traits borrowed from better films such as Over the Edge, River’s Edge, George Washington and more recent fair like Mud, whose director Jeff Nichols serves as this film’s executive producer.

In short, it feels too studied, and as a result you can see the young cast trying too hard to act – a fact not helped by the plot veering towards the histrionic as guns are introduced and Jacob starts compounding one bad decision after another in his misguided efforts to prevent his little brother being taken away from him and his dad. In its quieter moments, though, Paul provides enough grace notes to see it through. Just.

• Hellion screens at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 24 and 25 June, Cineworld, Edinburgh www.edfilmfest.org.uk