Jeff rey Dahmer movie debuts at Tribeca festival

“My Friend Dahmer,” a drama shot in northeast Ohio last summer, had its world premiere Friday night as part of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

Based on John “Derf” Backderf’s acclaimed graphic novel from 2012, the film stars Ross Lynch as Jeffrey Dahmer, who was an acquaintance of Backderf’s at Revere High School in the 1970s.

Dahmer, the notorious serial killer, rapist and cannibal, grew up in Bath Township. He was murdered in prison in 1994. The film focuses on Dahmer as a coming-of-age adolescent, before the killing spree. Director Marc Meyers, who adapted Backderf’s novel for the screen, was even able to film in Dahmer’s boyhood home in Bath Township.

Lynch, the lead singer of R5, starred in the “Teen Beach” movies and spent five years singing and dancing as Austin Moon on the Disney TV series “Austin & Ally.”

“My Friend Dahmer,” which also stars Alex Wolff as Derf, and Anne Heche and Dallas Roberts as Dahmer’s parents, Joyce and Lionel, is already receiving pre-festival buzz.

Entertainment Weekly pegged it as one of the Tribeca films that “most deserve to be on your radar,” and predicted the 21-year-old Lynch would become “one of Tribeca’s biggest breakouts.”

Rolling Stone placed the film at the top of its Tribeca list of “20 movies we can’t wait to see,” describing it as “a sympathetic look into Dahmer’s troubled childhood, and a more nuanced examination of the future celebrity cannibal as he unsuccessfully tries to keep his budding homicidal desires in check.”

My Friend Dahmer is Meyers’ fifth feature film. Ohio movie buffs may be familiar with some of his other titles. How He Fell in Love played at the 40th Cleveland International Film Festival last year, and the coming-of-age drama “Harvest” screened in the 34th CIFF in 2010, when it won the Best American Independent Film award.

“My Friend Dahmer” does not have a theatrical release date.