The good is so, so good here: Hesher is an exceptional character, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt transforms what could easily have been a scenery-chewing lark if a lesser actor got hold of it (Jack Black's patented wackiness would've inspired a rash of suicides) into what will undoubtedly be one of the year's best performances. Hesher is not so much a human being as a force of nature, an unrestrained id made real. The plot doesn't matter, but here you go anyway: An adolescent boy named TJ (Devin Brochu) doesn't so much meet Hesher as invoke him from the darkness of his own soul. TJ's life is fucked and Hesher is kind of his Metallica-loving guardian angel, a taciturn metalhead barreling forth from the latter half of the 1980s who doesn't wear shirts (his truly repulsive tattoos—a hand flipping a bird and a stick-figure suicide—just want to be free) or basically do anything else that society demands.

So Hesher forces his way into TJ's house—it's practically a home invasion—and gets comfortable, stripping down to his tighty whities and eating meals with the family (Rainn Wilson glowers as the dad and Piper Laurie delightfully underplays TJ's grandmother as a senior-moment-addled suggestion of a human being—more on them in a second). Hesher watches everything that goes on inside the house—he keeps his judgments silent—and he casually carves up and generally improves TJ's life in his role as guardian angel, except for the random moments where he torments the boy like an asshole older brother. Gordon-Levitt's sleepy eyes never betray what he's going to do next, and that unpredictability enlivens his character. Hesher delivers three monologues in Hesher, and each of them is a comedic Dadaist masterpiece that confounds the narrative flow of the movie. Hell, most of Gordon-Levitt's performance confounds the narrative flow of the movie.

And that's a good thing, because we are about to get into what is horrible about Hesher: just about everything else. Besides Laurie and Brochu, Gordon-Levitt has nothing to hold his performance up. Even Natalie Portman, as the object of TJ's unrequited crush, flounders in a role that's about as generic-indie-movie as they come (she wears big plastic glasses and acts like she's tentative about everything, and her creativity is stifled by her dead-end job!). It's her worst performance since the Star Wars prequels.

The script doesn't do anyone any favors. It's an indie comedy about grief, so we know we're going to see several things. Wilson sits around in sweatpants because his wife has died. He has a scruffy beard. At some point, he shaves his beard, which is a symbol of him beginning to overcome his grief. Another main character's grief is represented in a physical object that becomes the emotional MacGuffin for the film, and there's a supposedly cathartic scene where the main characters walk in slow motion toward the camera. If it weren't for Gordon-Levitt, the whole movie would be a total dud, but it's worth watching just for his performance.