Problem child

Coming-of-ager grows into something special…

We kick off with a blast of discordant noise as James White ( Girls’ Christopher Abbott) stumbles drunkenly through a discoblaring nightclub and out into a New York morning. The camera tracks back with him, holding in tight close-up on his sweaty, bleary face, telling us that this is a guy wholly wrapped up in his own immature, irresponsible self. Yet before the film’s hit the end credits we’ll see him tenderly cradling his terminally cancer-stricken mother in his arms, soothing her with a tale of the blissful future as a beloved grandma that she’ll never live to know: “See me happy. See me as a father… See me smile to see you so happy.”

Just how James gets from here to there is the core of Josh Mond’s debut directorial feature. Mond (producer of Simon Killer, Afterschool and Martha Marcy May Marlene) brings true-life emotional investment to the story: he lost his own mother to cancer not so long ago. Which may be why, for all James’s short-fused douche behaviour, for all his abuse of his best friend Nick (Scott Mescudi) and of his patient girlfriend Jayne (Makenzie Leigh), he never totally forfeits our sympathy.

Abbott’s riveting performance as James, at once aggressive and helpless – “What am I supposed to do?” he howls pathetically – is the prime focus of Mond’s fluid camera, but he’s matched by Cynthia Nixon, who’s heartbreakingly vulnerable as his dying mother Gail. Honest, moving and often unexpectedly funny, James White leaves us with Gail’s words to her son: “It’s OK to be sad.”