[tps_title]1. Thumbsucker (Mike Mills, 2005)[/tps_title]
I said it was a personal list, didn’t I? The truth is, Thumbsucker is a film I would hardly expect anyone else to place on a list of this sort, let alone at #1. Yet the effect the film had on me – at 17, when I first saw it, aged the same as the thumb-sucking protagonist – was enormous. It was an emotional wallop the kind I haven’t experienced from a movie before or since, a catharsis of total acknowledgement and understanding. Watching it was a bit like confronting my own life, staring back at me, angsty, uncertain, and frustrated, all those tempestuous teenage emotions being relit like blazing fires. Though I didn’t suck my thumb or have the refined, otherworldly features of Lou Taylor-Pucci’s Justin Cobb, it was all too real. For me, no other high school-set film quite has the same gentle yet bruising poignancy, quite displays the discombobulating whirlwind of adolescence with the same gutsiness or heartache, or quite embodies a confusion that feels so immense it could topple you over. In the end, it reaches a release that feels both fantastical and, just maybe, kind of possible. That’s enough reassurance for someone still not sure how, or in what direction, they’re growing.
See also: Ghost World (2001), C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005)
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