Mr. Gordon-Levitt plays a freak who metabolizes out of nowhere like a heavy-metal Mary Poppins. It is never clear who he is or where he came from, but he does teach a few things about mourning to the dysfunctional 13-year-old T.J. (Devin Brochu), his catatonic father Paul (Rainn Wilson) who sleeps all day, and his doughy, dying grandmother (a ravaged Piper Laurie, of all people) who does the cooking and tells really boring stories over and over again. They have never recovered from the death of T.J.'s mother in a car crash, but for reasons only the filmmaker knows, the mood lifts when the gruesome Hesher walks through the house with green teeth and a body that looks like a flaming battleship, strips down to his frayed jock strap to do his laundry, and starts watching porno flicks on the VCR. He loves to fill the house with smoke, talk dirty, blow things up and shock the world out of complacency. The film's major flaw is that it never bothers to explain why the family doesn't call the cops. But hell, then you wouldn't get the phony redemption scene, or the ridiculous renewal of hope scene. 

Hesher is a violent, uncontrollable wild man who might easily hail from Borneo, but in time the script is hell-bent on revealing a sensitivity to the plight of others that is as bracing as electro-shock therapy. Natalie Portman makes an unlucky cameo appearance as a penniless supermarket cashier named Nicole who becomes T.J.'s only friend when she rescues him from a sadistic bully. Hesher wrecks everyone's trust by throwing Nicole into bed (she likes tattoos) but redeems himself by showing up at a funeral stoned and dragging the corpse away on a motorbike. Don't ask. The whole thing seems to have been directed by long-distance cell phone and edited with a rotary jigsaw. Mr. Gordon-Levitt, in the title role, never makes the lobotomized Hesher a coherent character. The only thing he doesn't set fire to is the negative. The kid who plays T.J. looks like a miniature version of the already miniature Justin Bieber. Only the great Piper Laurie delivers dollar value. Otherwise, Hesher is to movies what graffiti is to a rotting fence.

rreed@observer.com

HESHER
Running time 105 minutes
Written by Spencer Susser and David Michod
Directed by Spencer Susser
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Natalie Portman, Rainn Wilson

1/4

But while Dr. Hershlag's family ties make the work notable, the literary content here is of special value. The novel begins with a prologue in which an unnamed narrator is told by a doctor that he is in possession of a "micropenis and two microtesticles." Here's his medical exam:

This time I won't let the doctor pull down my underwear. No way will this man feel my balls again and measure my penis with a yardstick. I hate him. I hate the clinic.

For six months, Mom's been dragging me every week to this nightmare of a place, to see the awful doctor. The freezing stethoscope and his cold hands give me the creeps. Why would the bastard think his white coat gives him the right to embarrass me in front of the nurse, telling her with his smart-ass attitude to look at my private parts, pulling my elastic without permission? [...]

Yessss. The blond nurse is back. Her hands are warm. Sure, take my bloodpressure. You want the other arm, too? She smells good. I wish she'd keep leaning over like that. Haven't seen a better pair of legs-not ever. I wish this part of the visit would last forever.

Twenty-eight years later, a pair of doctors debate whether cloning is ethical, using a perhaps relevant example in the case of award-winning couple Natalie Portman and Benjamin Millipied:

"Do you realize the revolution that cloning is about to bring?" Nicholson now cracked what Cody considered a smile. "Breeding is for the birds, a bad genetic experiment. You start out mating two award-winning animals, and if you're lucky, what do you get? An offspring like Cookie, as pretty as Mom and Dad or prettier. But then what? Its life span is bound to be shortened, because no one checked for the disease genes that are rampant in the breed."

Nicholson is a man of vision, Cody pondered. Always thinks big.

Months later in a temporally fractured narrative, our heroine, Dr. Anya Krim arrives in a burst of narrative innovation:

Feinberg stepped down from the double stool and crowded her again.  "You were hired to work on stem-cell research and organ cloning. Instead, you've become the fertility guru to Capitol Hill and the White House. Don't think you've become untouchable just because the First Lady hired you as her fertility doctor. We'll finish this discussion later." He thundered out as he had thundered in.

[...]

"Ambiguous genitalia," [Krim] said. He nodded in agreement. They both knew what that meant. There was no way to tell Bonnie Marshall whether she'd just given birth to a boy or a girl.

We'd buy this airport novel! Dr. Hershlag has clearly brought his medical knowledge to bear upon the craft of writing--but he also seems to approach medicine as a literary critic. On his website, howfarwouldyougotohaveababy.com, he this offers medical advice: "And you know what they say, MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS.  Have I already told you I hate clichés?  Well, I do.  But I have to admit, this is a good one."

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

But the author's pedigree may be more appealing to publishers than the novel's plot or subject matter. Dr. Hershlag is the father of actress Natalie Hershlag, better known as Portman.

Dr. Hershlag said that he'd always intended to publish the book conventionally, but he'd run low on time for edits due to "my day job, if you want," and decided to put it out himself. Later, raves from friends convinced him to try his luck with established publishers.

Misconception is an example of a new subgenre, one that Dr. Hershlag has dubbed the "reproductive thriller." As for his family's recent real-life procreative endeavors--baby Millepied is due this summer--Dr. Hershlag told the Transom, "When I hold a baby that I knew as an embryo a year ago--I can't even describe the feeling. It never goes away. And when I think that a few months down the road I'm going to hold the baby that's going to be my grandchild..."

He didn't finish the thought, but we got the idea.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

He didn't know who anybody was, but that was to change. His high-contrast, brutally honest photos of celebrities like Anjelica Huston, Dennis Hopper and Adrien Brody, taken documentary style with a hand-held flash, have became well known. (Check out our slideshow.)

Touring the Park Avenue Armory last weekend, where he spoke at the Aipad Photography Fair, he talked to The Observer about politics, celebrity, and about becoming, as he calls himself, Hollywood's "court jester." 

You've taken a lot of photographs after award ceremonies. What is a winner's body language like, and what is a loser's?
When I was at the Oscars, which is the photographs we are speaking about, from the book (The Vanities, which is soon to come out), I would watch the victories and non-victories over the television set. [And then those people would arrive.] And some people have a wonderful streak of graciousness and so when they win, they actually hunker down and they say, "Oh my god, not me," even the most famous and gifted. And then there are those seemingly assholes who win and get all pomp and puffed. But they are not assholes, [I look at it as] just another form of poetry.

What would surprise people if they were at these after-parties?
Before the Vanity Fair party, Graydon Carter paces; he's nervous, he wants everybody to have a good time.

But nothing really surprises me. Lindsay Lohan took off her shoes; oh, that's a surprise. Or Tommy Hilfiger looks like a prig, a preppy guy; oh, that's a surprise. Or Qunicy Jones looks like a satisfied and handsome individual. No surprise there.

My wife was really surprised by the extent of the botox therapy ... and the proportions of many of the women who were known to be stars. She was amazed at how many of the stars you see on TV [that] were big on the screen really in fact were quite small. They were proportionally perfect, but using camera technique, you make them into a bigger person.

Is there a story behind the famous photo you've done of Meryl Streep talking to Natalie Portman?
That's a quite a picture, that one. ... The story is the moment itself. What the story was between them is not to be told because it's not to be known. It must have been something because the intimacy of the faces between them is really quite suggestive. Not that it's necessarily a lurid story, but it does look like a story of a human event of some order. 

What are the ethics, if any, of photographing someone inebriated?
If a person is drunk and degrading himself, I'll probably not want to do anything. ... I'm interested in people who are drunk and having a fucking good time. [Ed note: Which doesn't necessarily mean, he granted, that they want pictures taken of them at the time.] I consider myself an empathic sensualist. 

At 70, what advice would you have for young Hollywood, the Lindsay Lohan types who are perhaps too familiar with judges, probation officers and police?
In order for me to answer that, I'd have to study for the priesthood. 

What do you think of celebrity culture?
My relationship to the celebrity culture is peripheral. I didn't stay when I was invited to go on the yacht. I'd rather go home to be with my wife. So I didn't get to be in that inside circle and that inside circle is incestuous and particularly dysfunctional--but no more or less dysfunctional than any other subculture, but obviously more theatrical in the dysfunction. 

You didn't accept invitations to the yacht and the like? Why not?
There's a line of distinction. Many people with access to privilege, if you will, try to access privilege, I don't.  

The biggest misconception about your photography?
I have photographed celebrities, but I am not a paparazzi. [I do not] practice the same kind of barren hunger.

How many photos have you taken in your lifetime?
Probably 10 million. Now, the level of photographic promiscuity is immense. Everybody becomes a whore of the instant.

"I am deeply shocked and disgusted by the video of John Galliano's comments that surfaced today. In light of this video, and as an individual who is proud to be Jewish, I will not be associated with Mr. Galliano in any way. I hope at the very least, these terrible comments remind us to reflect and act upon combating these still-existing prejudices that are the opposite of all that is beautiful."

Ms. Portman speaks out after a journalist's question regarding Portman's choice of Rodarte over Dior was stopped short and stricken from the record in the Oscars press room (though she did not wear Dior dresses to the Golden Globes or SAG Awards either). No details are yet known about the actress's contract with Dior, which has her modeling for the perfume Miss Dior Cherie; Ms. Portman's phrasing that she will not be associated with Mr. Galliano could leave the perfume ads (a commercial is seen below) intact after the designer's suspension from Dior.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOoe3qGWxVE

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

It's her celebrity, in fact, that's the reason it's even gotten this far--without the current Portmania, the film might have gone direct-to-video, if history is guide (often, movies emerge from the buying frenzies at festivals and end up going direct-to-video). The Other Woman was filmed years ago, and played in September 2009 at the Toronto Film Festival. At the time known as Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (a bit too similar to the 2010 release Love and Other Drugs, no?) the film received rave reviews at Toronto (A. O. Scott isn't raving, but loves the lead performance). This, perhaps, would have been Portman's Oscar!

Only those who venture to the IFC Center (or order the movie On Demand, where it's been available for a month) will be able to say for sure, but there's no reason to believe that a dearth of quality held back the film (The Men Who Stare at Goats and Youth in Revolt, among other bombs, saw release shortly after their runs at Toronto in 2009). In fact, Portman's performance, even now, is getting praise! But recall that, up until this very moment, Portman has not been bankable.

Portman toplining a movie would have been a difficult sell in 2009--she'd done Star Wars, but a turnip could have sold that franchise. In 2009, Portman also made New York, I Love You (which saw a small release), and Hesher (which is scheduled for April of this year): she was an indie actress, not one who sold tickets. She'd tried the marketplace: Portman was coming off The Other Boleyn Girl and Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, neither successes. The producers of The Other Woman weren't being foolish by waiting years to release their film--they were helping their own cause by waiting for Portman's star to rise. They were lucky hers did, and she's lucky this film's performance likely won't affect her fortunes either way. (At least, not as much as the curse of the Oscar will!)

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The Times doesn't claim to have any Natalie-related "scoops," though, as Millepied seems content to not discuss his Black Swan dance partner (he did the choreography and danced the lead male part in the film's production of Swan Lake). Instead, we get a fun look at the world of wooing high-minded ballet patrons, another stage where Millepied excels. It seems those funding the shows just think he's the prettiest, and loosen their purses accordingly.

“It doesn’t hurt that he has a French accent," admitted School of American Ballet board member and Chanel heiress Coco (!) Kopelman. 

Someone's got to fund the sets and tutus, and other "serious" ballet artists seem a wee bit jealous at Millepied's golden-boy status. What's his real import here -- the dancing or the dollars?

But some go further and cattily whisper that Mr. Millepied’s charisma makes up for his shortcomings as a choreographer, and is the real reason for his numerous commissions. For instance, when the Pacific Northwest Ballet tapped him to choreograph an original work in 2008, it did so knowing that the work would be underwritten by an endowment from the Joyce Theater, the Stephen and Cathy Weinroth Fund for New Works.

Not that any of this matters. Once he Portman have a perfect and beautiful little kid to trot out at fundraisers, no Millepied production will ever have to beg for funding again.

Click for What Twitter Taught Us: Anderson Cooper Gets Clocked in the Face, Egypt-Style

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Yes, perhaps the average human being lacks the superpowers that allowed Booker to communicate with hundreds of random residents and then go, shovel in hand, to dig them out -- but, hey, this is pioneering stuff here!

What else did we learn? Well, maybe these tidbits about Kim Kardashian, Lydia Hearst, and Natalie Portman are less "important" than one man cleaning up an entire city, but we'll take our highbrow with a side order of lowbrow, thank you very much. Here you are, the last What Twitter Taught Us of that incredible year that was 2010.

Click for What Twitter Taught Us: Cory Booker Tweets His Way to a Snow-less Newark>>

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234