From its graceful opening credits sequence, which, backed by an elegant classical music score, fixes the viewer’s gaze on some tasteful wallpaper, writer and director Noah Buschel’s The Phenom immediately goes out of its way to subvert all the expectations associated with baseball movies.
Despite its rigorously formal leanings, The Phenom is still a film about a young man struggling to regain his focus and grow into the athlete he was born to be. But unlike Field of Dreams, Bad News Bears, Bull Durham and countless other films centered on the sport, The Phenom is more interested in its hero’s psychological trappings than his talents on the field.
Johnny Simmons effortlessly carries The Phenom as Hopper Gibson, a good-looking major league rookie pitcher, ranked the third-highest prospect in the country. Despite the support of his hometown (he’s a celebrity at his high school, where classmates can’t help but stare at him in the corridors), a gorgeous new girlfriend and a loving mother who dotes on his every move, Gibson becomes mysteriously remote, which in turn affects his game.
He also grows increasingly cynical for no apparent reason. “Everybody is using everybody all the time,” he says to his girlfriend, basically begging to be dumped.
When his father Hopper Sr, enters the picture, all is made crystal clear. He’s played by Ethan Hawke in a commanding performance that bears no similarities to the actor’s loving work as another father to a teenage son in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Hopper Sr is a monster of a man. After surprising Gibson with a visit, inked with a new tattoo following a stint in prison, he wastes no time in abusing his son, flinging a full beer can at the boy’s head and cutting him in the process.
“Everything you’ve accomplished, you owe to me,” he sneers, visibly jealous at his son’s success.
With the sudden arrival of his father, Gibson grows increasingly suspicious of everyone in his life, including his unorthodox sports therapist (Paul Giamatti), working to help him uncover the origins of his anxiety. Their scenes are the most strained of the film, inserted as a lazy framing device to add some semblance of structure to what’s otherwise an admirably scattershot narrative.
The film’s at its strongest when Hawke is on screen. Unfortunately his character is given short shrift, only relegated to a handful of sequences that serve to explain Gibson’s self-loathing behavior.
Still, the film largely succeeds on its own peculiar terms. Sequences, like one in which Gibson is seduced and then robbed by an oddball blonde (Louisa Krause) at a rundown motel, seem as if cut from a collection of short stories.
Buschel’s screenplay also has brainy overtones unusual for the genre. “You couldn’t throw all those strikes if you were a Marxist,” Gibson is told after he mistakenly refers to himself as a socialist. The Phenom, like its protagonist, is hard to pin down, making for a film that’s transfixing and opaque in equal measure.
