As Felix Thompson’s breathtakingly assured debut feature opens, the 15-year-old eponymous protagonist – known to almost everyone as “Scab” – is spray painting a naughty word on a school chum’s garage.
This is not, we soon learn, the action of a casual delinquent: it is rather, a last-ditch attempt to hit back at vicious local bullies from the bottom of the dog-pile.
Summer is not looking like fun for Jack (Boardwalk Empire's Charlie Plummer). Condemned to a repeat term at summer school, indiscriminately pursued by local brute Scott (Danny Flaherty, terrifying) and his henchmen, and roundly mocked by older sibling Tom (Christian Madsen, unmistakeably the son of Michael, in both face and menacing swagger) at home, the only light at the end of the tunnel is provided by Robyn (Scarlet Lizbeth), who teases intimate photos from Jack, only to show them to her friends.
Jack and his hurried mother initially miss the phone call asking them to take care of Ben (Cory Nichols), a younger and even more beat-uppable cousin. The arrival of the recently traumatised youngster only serves to escalate hostilities with Scott and his cruel cohorts. Can things possibly get any worse for the teen? But, of course.
King Jack treads a most familiar path as Brandon Roots's camera follows bikes careering through hazy summer days. But the film – the best American coming- of-age picture we've seen since David Gordon Green's George Washington – is far better than its familiar indie-schmindie sub-genre ought to allow for.
Felix Thompson's screenplay is a beautifully poised thing: here we find an honest depiction of adolescent sexuality without a hint of Larry Clark-brand sleaze and a terrifying depiction of teen violence, but minus La Haine's cautionary shock value.
Utilising eye-watering authenticity where Mud had poetics and Hide Your Smiling Faces had dreaminess, King Jack is never better than when trained on Plummer and Nichols, whose stone-throwing, bully-evading misadventures teeter between childlike wonderment and bruising adulthood.
