Best Keanu: “I guess I stopped trying to be anything. I accepted myself and all my human disorder.”

There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in Thumbsucker. For a long while, I thought it would be a male version of Lady Bird — a film I didn’t particularly care for — but it eventually proved more interesting and divergent than a simple coming-of-age drama.

Thumbsucker focuses on Justin, a 17-year-old who sucks his thumb. He lives with his mother, an RN who’s seemingly obsessed with a TV actor; father, who left a promising football career ostensibly because of an injury; and younger brother, who’s just there.

Justin calls his parents by their first names. He regularly sees an orthodontist who has a copy of “Be Here Now” in the waiting room. He’s drawn to a girl in his high school debate club who is the child of environmental activists. He underperforms academically and, despite being in debate club, seems not all that interested in participating in debates.

It’s Justin’s father who seems particularly bothered by his thumbsucking, to the point he inks the offending digit with his initials: “MFC” to remind him not to do it.

The film never explains why Justin sucks his thumb, but shows us what happens when he doesn’t. Justin visits Perry, the unorthodox orthodontist played by Keanu Reeves, who suggests hypnosis after explaining he does not want to fix Justin’s teeth — damaged by the habit — all over again.

Perry leads Justin through a kind of white light guided meditation where he meets his power animal. He tells Justin to call on his power animal whenever he needs, whenever he wants to suck his thumb. The scene is neither melodramatic nor overtly humorous, but it did make me want to find a new dentist. My hairstylist told me she does reiki and my massage therapist used to be a social worker. Why can’t I have a dentist who also does soul retrieval?

At the end, Perry tells Justin that, from now on, his thumb will taste like echinacea. And apparently, it does, because subsequent scenes show his face scrunched up in disgust every time he tries to engage in the habit.

When Justin can no longer suck his thumb, it appears to result in severe anxiety. He takes this out on Perry, whom he distracts during a cycle race so he runs off the road.

(Side note: This scene must be the explanation for why the credits of Thumbsucker list a “stunt double” for Keanu Reeves, because other than playing with dental equipment and messing with the subconscious of a vulnerable teen, Perry doesn’t do much dangerous stuff. That stunt double turns out to be Chad Stahelski, stunt coordinator on The Matrix, director of the John Wick trilogy, and Trinity’s dickhead husband in The Matrix Resurrections.)

So begins Justin’s journey through Ritalin (he’s diagnosed with ADHD by school officials based on dodgy criteria), which turns him into a debate star and then a “monster,” according to his debate team coach. Even that is lacking in the melodrama, as Justin progresses beyond that, too, leaving the over-medicated-kids underlying debate as nothing more than a sign that this film was made in 2005, when that type of controversy was more common, and not the film’s central focus.

Ultimately, Justin is not the only one who changes over the course of Thumbsucker, which makes the film richer. Rebecca, his initial object of affection, evolves from debate star to “stoner,” which Justin initially only sees from afar. Perry changes too, both in how and where he practices dentistry and who he appears to be. The connection between Justin’s mother and the movie actor isn’t all it seems either, and it turns out the younger brother — who had been just there — has his own story to tell, too.

There were many scenes and pieces in Thumbsucker that didn’t quite work for me, but the characters were well-developed and the story kept moving. The film never really reveals if it’s about any one thing; it certainly, at the end, is not an indictment of thumbsucking. As the film aptly reminds us, there was never anything wrong with Justin to begin with. He was just a kid trying to navigate a kind of stereotypical teenage world, where adults in all sectors — home, school, health care — load on you with expectations, but really, they’re just as fucked up as you are.

(Side note: Those end credits also mention the site www.thumbsuckingadults.com, worth a visit if only for the fact that it still looks like websites used to look in 1999.)

Really, there’s no such thing as “best Keanu” in Thumbsucker, because all the Keanu here is fantastic Keanu. The film also somewhat answers the question I had after watching The SpongeBob Movie: would you buy Keanu Reeves playing the role of the spirit guide?

I think the answer is still probably no, but this elevated it to a “maybe.” Perry isn’t a spirit guide, exactly; he’s initially draped in New Age tropes, but holds no deeper wisdom — arguably, even by the end, when he has another meaningful, and kind, conversation with Justin. He is like all of us when we get to a certain point in life: just accepting ourselves and our human disorder.

April 2022