Going All the Way

REVIEW
Here's a surprise -- a period coming-of-age film, shot in a very trendy, music video style (flash frames, jump cuts, etc.) with a disaffected youth as the protagonist, and it's actually good. Davies gives a mannered yet ultimately moving performance as a shy, geeky Army vet who returns home to 1950s Indianapolis to live with his painfully status quo parents (including a bizarrely cartoonish Clayburgh). His sanity is kept intact by his friendship with a fellow vet (the winning, likable Affleck), a high school acquaintance who ran with a different crowd. Despite their differences, they become close friends, dreaming of leaving the Midwest to go to college in NYC, in the meantime getting drunk, chasing women and studying art and photography. While both its title (it sounds like an '80s teen sex comedy) and plot suggest otherwise, Going All the Way is actually an intelligent comedy-drama which touches knowingly on questions of conformity, popularity, religion, morality, and especially sexuality.