My friend dahmer
MY FRIEND DAHMER One of America’s most notorious serial killers gets a school days biopic…
The Disney version of Jeffrey Dahmer. Sort of.
BIetween 1978 and 1991, ‘Milwaukee Cannibal’ Jeffrey Dahmer murdered 17 men before violating their corpses and consuming the remains. But in 1977, ‘Jeff’ Dahmer was your typical highschool student in your typical Midwestern town. “He wasn’t yet a monster,” claims writer/director Marc Meyers. “This is a movie about the moment before, so you can understand how your neighbour could fall off a cliff emotionally right in front of you.”
Based on the graphic novel memoir by Derf Backderf – a fair-weather friend of Dahmer’s from high school – Meyers’ film is a ghoulishly funny and profoundly sad portrait of a future killer. Former Disney kid Ross Lynch stars as the teenage Dahmer, the film charting his senior year as he gains a certain notoriety playing the class clown, all while dissolving animal bones in his shed, drinking to deal with his parents’ divorce and developing a violent infatuation with a local doctor.
In retrospect, the warning signs were obvious, but in the hazy days of the ’70s, no one even thought to look. “He slipped through the cracks,” posits
Meyers, who shot scenes in Dahmer’s childhood home for added authenticity. “All the doors that could help him were shut, and the ones that allowed his depravity and sanity to slip were opened. So it’s a cautionary tale.” But rather than wink at Dahmer’s fate, Meyers takes a journalistic approach, with the characters surrounding Dahmer acting as they would in 1977. “They didn’t know that what they were saying or doing had any reflection on what he would become. That was the entire goal.”
With Tarantino currently gearing up for production on Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, a film set against the backdrop of the Manson family murders, Hollywood’s infatuation with America’s home-grown monsters shows no sign of abating. But what’s surprising about Meyers’ film is how it will make you feel. “Everyone’s saying, ‘This is not what I expected,’” nods Meyers, who spent months touring his film on the festival circuit. “They like the way they’re made to feel empathetic for somebody they didn’t expect.”
Not that a film asking us to sympathise with the young Jeffrey Dahmer was easy to get made. Meyers faced “knee-jerk reactions” to the controversial script until it made the 2014 Black List. “Then I got a flood of young talent that wanted to meet,” he smiles. After auditioning “over 100 young actors” to play the young Dahmer, Meyers tapped an unlikely source – the Disney Channel.
“I knew how talented he is,” Meyers says of Lynch. “He was looking for a ballsy role to break out of what he was doing. And then as a dancer, I knew he could get the gait and the posture. Whatever I thought was possible, he went beyond that.”
ETA | 1 JUNE / MY FRIEND DAHMER OPENS THIS SUMMER.