One of the best things you’ll see all week: Thumper

Thumper begins as an artsy look at the life of high school kids with all their social media and first loves and difficulties in school and casual drug use and absent parents. Leads Eliza Taylor and Daniel Webber positively glow as a young couple, ablaze with bright blue eyes and radiant smiles. But Taylor doesn’t quite fit. She’s got too much presence to play a high school student in a movie about the travails of vacuous youth. Beneath the self-assured sexuality of a young Kathleen Turner, there’s something maternal about her, something with the wholesome midwestern quality of a zaftig Reese Witherspoon. She has gravity beyond her years, or at least beyond the years of the character she’s playing. She’s as out of place as a 22 Jump Street character. Thumper knows just what to do with this disconnect.

Writer/director Ross Jordan has a background in MTV docudrama, which presumably informed this movie’s starting point. But Thumper doesn’t stay where it begins. By the time it has strayed into conventional territory, dragging a trail of cliches behind it, it has at least come in from a new direction. The cast can handle the familiar beats, with Pablo Schreiber charging ahead. When Taylor’s character asks him if he’s a shepherd, he demurs to deliver a small speech about the disaffected lower class, tinged with just the right amount of racism to sound real. But Schreiber is a shepherd here. Without his presence, Thumper probably wouldn’t work, and Jordan’s cliches would sink instead of skipping across the surface. Schreiber is an actor in the middle of a fascinating career, spanning crime thrillers and arthouse comedies, action schlock and serious drama, TV and movies. Come to Thumper for its attractive blonde leads, freshly imported from Australia (it’s a real hoot to listen to Taylor and Webber in interviews, accents in full bloom). Stay for the Schreiber.