Fine 'Thumbsucker' is what it isn't

"The book is much better than the movie, everybody should know," says Mike Mills, the director of Thumbsucker, an adaptation of Walter Kirn's 1999 novel about a high-school senior who can't quit sucking his thumb.

A graphic artist-turned-music video director-turned filmmaker, Mills is being gracious, and modest, even if he is being sincere. ("You can stick so many more things in a book," he explains. "A book can digress so much easier than a film.") Because Thumbsucker - Mills' movie - is pretty darn good.

Lou Pucci, who was 17 when he played 17-year-old Justin Cobb, a mopey misfit in a nondescript Oregon town, won a special acting prize at the Sundance Film Festival for his role. The early reviews have been great. And the cast Mills rustled together for his project is nothing to sneeze at: Scottish indie goddess Tilda Swinton as Justin's mom, the imposing Law & Order: Criminal Intent hambone Vincent D'Onofrio as his dad, Vince Vaughn as the debate-team coach, Benjamin Bratt as a TV soap star in rehab, and Keanu Reeves as a New Age dentist who helps Justin with his orthodontic, and spiritual, dilemmas.

A keen-eyed exploration of adolescence and adulthood, the R-rated Thumbsucker, which opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse and Ritz Sixteen/NJ, is the kind of picture that doesn't fit easily into a slot. It's not a teen comedy, although teens are in it (Kelli Garner plays Justin's lust object of a classmate), and it can be, at times, wildly funny. It's not a straightforward coming-of-age drama, though Pucci's character does have his struggles and his triumphs.

It's not a lot of things, which is why Mills found it so hard to get made.

"I've never had more obstacles, I've never had more rejection," says Mills, 39, a member of the Directors Bureau, a commercial- and video-production collective that boasts Roman and Sofia Coppola. "Just look through the list of all the film companies, and they all said no - including Sony Pictures Classics," which ultimately acquired the film.

What kept Mills going was the knowledge that even if the business side of the industry had its doubts, the creative side did not. Swinton signed on early, committing to the role, and that drew other actors to the project.

"It was all kind of 'yes' on that side and all kind of 'no' on the financing side," Mills says on the phone from New York. "It took a cast that big, it took a club that big, to knock down the door."

Originally, Mills had an even bigger name in his lineup: Elijah Wood, star of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, had agreed to play Justin.

"He was 19 when we started looking for money," recalls Mills, "and he was 21 by the time I got financed. We both mutually decided that he was just too old to play a 17-year-old."

With his production money and all but his lead in hand, Mills had the luxury of casting an unknown if he wanted to. Pucci came along about eight weeks before the start date. The flight from his native New Jersey (he grew up in Middletown) to Los Angeles for his audition was his first time on a plane.

"He was nervous and he looked like a wreck and he looked really vulnerable and it all showed up," says Mills. "He wasn't hiding it, he wasn't putting some cool mask on top of it. . . .

"And that's what the film is sort of about: being able to live without the mask. That was what I was looking for and was so hard to find. You know, when you're that young, you often want to be older than you are and you want to be more together than you are. . . . But Lou didn't know any better, and he is also unconsciously wiser than that."

For his part, Pucci, who is now 20 and still lives in Jersey - "about 10 feet from the beach" - just remembers being a mess. He hadn't even looked at the audition scenes until he was airborne to L.A.

"I must have looked scared and weird and tired," he says from New York. "And I guess that worked."

Nervous as he was, Pucci was no stranger to showbiz. He was on Broadway when he was 12, playing the liederhosen-ed Friedrich in the 1997 revival of The Sound of Music. "That was really a huge thing, that I got to do that," he says, in a separate interview. "I was just the right height, and had just the right hair color and just the right voice. . . . But after doing 300-and-something of the same show, eight shows a week for a 12-year-old, well, you just want to die. So I just stopped completely. I said, 'OK, I'm not going to do anything for a little while.' And I didn't. I just went to school."

A few years later, though, he was back doing musical theater in Jersey. And going up for TV and movie parts in New York. His break: landing a supporting role in Rebecca Miller's distaff triptych, 2002's Personal Velocity.

Right now, the young actor is at work on Southland Tales, from Donnie Darko creator Richard Kelly. Pucci also has a couple of other indies in the can: The Chumscrubber (alienated youth in alienating suburbia) and 50 Pills (about a college kid who sells Ecstasy to make his tuition).

And as for Mills: After being with Thumbsucker for six years (he even designed the soundtrack cover art, the Web site, and the poster), he's ready to move on. "I'm working on an original screenplay," he reports. "Words don't come easily to me, and it's a big, huge transformation in my life, because I've never been very comfortable writing, or the whole idea of language and talking and all that, so it's a little shocking.

"One of my better strengths writing Thumbsucker was that I knew how bad I was."

Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/stevenrea.