‘Rebel in the Rye’ is too boilerplate
It’s ironic that films about trailblazing artists are so often filled with clichés. Reclusive author J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) famously forbade anyone from adapting his 1951 novel “The Catcher in the Rye” for the big screen. Shane Salerno’s ridiculous 2013 documentary “Salinger” — based on Salerno’s even worse book — proved that Salinger was right to keep filmmakers away from him, and from a novel whose iconoclast ic take on adolescent rebellion would become, paradoxically, iconic to the point of cliché.
Based on Kenneth Slawenski’s 2010 book “J.D. Salinger: A Life,” the biopic “Rebel in the Rye” is a marginal improvement on Salerno’s documentary. But like that misguided film, writer-director Danny Strong’s feature debut embodies the kind of phoniness that the author — and his signature characterHolden Caulfield— railed against.
Eyes will roll early in the film when Salinger (Nicholas Hoult of “MadMax: Fury Road”) is shown writing to editor Whit Burnett the words “Holden Caulfield is dead.” It’s an all-too-familiar way of opening a movie, with disillusionment. What follows backtracks to 1939, when a young and unpublished Salinger — who was then under the tutelage of Burnett (Kevin Spacey) at Columbia University— unsuccessfully attempts to court New York socialite Oona O’Neill (Zoey Deutch).
As Salinger’s teacher and, later, editor, Spacey is given some pretty cornball dialogue. Sitting in a New York cafe, he says, “I couldn’t think of a better place to read the work of the next Fitzgerald orHemingway thanright here in Greenwich Village.”
Burnett tries to impart lessons that are valuable for any aspiring writer: Don’t let the authorial voice, for instance, overwhelm the story. And Hoult and Spacey do their best to rise above Strong’s expository dialogue and ham- handed melodrama. The film briefly comes to life whenever Deutch — so winning in “Everybody Wants Some!!” — is on the screen.
But “Rebel in the Rye” quickly arrives at an impasse — one that’s almost inevitable in movies that attempt to reveal the mysteries of the creative process. “It just flowed out of me,” Salinger tells Burnett, who has been encouraging the young author to dig deeper into his Holden character.
What f lows out of Strong’s script, unfortunately, is boilerplate literary nonsense. “I shaped them. I challenged them,” Bur- nett crows, about such literary giants as William Saroyan and John Cheever. “I discovered them all.”
The most cringe-inducing moments in the film come when, after “Catcher” has been published, fans of the book awkwardly approach the author, dressed in what can only be called Holden Caulfield cosplay.
The publishers who initially rejected Salinger’s only novel are, for the most part, portrayed as people who just don’t get it. Yet one wonders whether Strong himself gets it. Most people who have read “Catcher in the Rye” wouldn’t envision its author approving of a film that includes a book-release montage — scored against a lightly swinging jazzvocal version of the song “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” — that shows Salinger examining his reflection in a store window.
It’s hard to imagine a filmmore inaptly named. As a movie, this “Rebel” is, as it turns out, terribly by the book.