In my short review I referred to Thumbsucker as a ‘Hollywood independent’ - seemingly an oxymoron if ever there was one. Yet it is a term that is now absolutely necessary to describe a particular type of American film.

I recently attended a panel about the state of US independent cinema at Raindance, the UK’s biggest independent film festival. As up-and-coming American directors and producers hashed out the ins and outs of the US scene, something that kept being said, almost as a casual aside, was that there really isn’t such a thing as American independent cinema anymore. Economically speaking, this is more or less true: many previously independent studios (for example Miramax and New Line) were bought by majors in the post-Tarantino lower-budget boom of the mid nineties and, although there are still many films made without studio money today, few will ever get distributed without it.

Yet we still hear the word ‘independent’ bandied about in relation to many American movies released each year. A word also often used, that could perhaps be said to be more appropriate, is indie - a term which, although originally used simply as a shortening of ‘independent’, also has unintended connotations that imply ‘independent- ish’: films which are not independent, but are like independents. An ‘indie’ (or, as I prefer to term it, a ‘Hollywood independent’) is now any American film which may have been made by a Hollywood studio (or one of it’s ‘independent’ subsidiaries, eg. Warner Independent, Fox Searchlight) for a comparatively lower budget - say, under $10 million - for a comparatively smaller market (i.e: mainly US and Europe), and may have (although this isn’t crucial) a somewhat ‘alternative’, un-Hollywood view of the world.

Thumbsucker can certainly be described in this way, as can pretty much any example of the ‘Quirky New Wave’. Made for around $4 million, with stars like Keanu Reeves, Vince Vaughn, Tilda Swinton and Vincent Donofrio, it is certainly not independent as John Cassavetes ( Shadows[1960],The Killing of A Chinese Bookie[1976]) would have understood it; it was not made with money from the pockets of director Mike Mill’s friends and family. Yet it has a certain independence of thought, subject-matter and style which distinguish it from the mainstream and guarantee that it will never have the mass-appeal of a Hollywood blockbuster (the only type of film that can ever truly be called ‘universal’). It is about insecurity, loneliness, family; it has a soundtrack provided by ‘alternative’ musicians; it has an odd poster, with no stars faces.

The reason I am focussing so much on the industrial context of the film is that Thumbsucker seems an especially emblematic example of a ‘Hollywood independent’ and might allow us to take stock of the trend. For one thing, it has the potential to be particularly financially successful: it has at least one indisputable A-list star (Reeves), an attractive soundtrack tie-in album (by Elliot Smith and The Polyphonic Spree), and its protagonist is a teenager, automatically giving it a convenient way in to the primary US target market (15 to 25 year olds). I first heard of it through its aggressive marketing campaign on IMDB, alerting me to both its distributor’s financial clout and their wily understanding of who its potential market would consist of.

It could be argued (and is, by some more wilfully high-brow critics) that this essential niceness - the sometimes almost naïve generosity and love for its characters that so much of the Wave displays - makes it lightweight and aligns it far more with the ‘Hollywood’ half of its tag than with the ‘independent’. As I have said, in a purely economic sense this is probably true: a comic world inhabited by largely likeable people who will eventually be given a happy (or at least optimistic) ending is easier to sell to a studio executive than a dark, unforgiving one filled with people who are given no hope in hell of redemption.

Yet for me the hard-won, bittersweet warmth that these films’ (Thumbsucker being no exception) exude is one of their greatest, and most unique, assets. Indeed, there is in fact often a sense of sharp, wistful longing going on alongside the optimism that I would say is absolutely informed specifically by the films’ knowledge of their own status as products of the Hollywood cinema - a self-conscious, yet un-cynical, acknowledgement of the fact that they do occasionally touch on wish-fulfilling fantasy. The final shot of Justin running in slow motion through the streets of New York to the joyful strains of the Polyphonic Spree in Thumbsucker is a perfect example of this: in some respects it is a Hollywood happy ending, yet it is also pointedly and realistically open-ended, asking us to question the optimism at the same time as we embrace it.

Perhaps most interestingly, Thumbsucker has celebrity-worship (and that closely related phenomenon fantasy-worship) as one of its themes, particularly embodied by Justin’s mother’s (Tilda Swinton) adoration of daytime TV star Matt Schramm (Benjamin Bratt). At one point Justin’s father (Vincent D’Onofrio) complains that he cannot possibly compete with this man who comes from “out there in picture-land”, even though in reality this burned-out actor is a recovering drug addict. If this sub-plot was featured in, say, a French arthouse picture it would feel far less complex and powerful than it does here. As it is, because this is a borderline-Hollywood movie, it is itself a piece of “picture-land” - and it knows it...

In a film about people trying in vain to find the one magical thing that will make their lives work perfectly, Justin thus receives advice from Keanu Reeves, playing a severely philosophically-confused lifestyle tourist who leaps from ideology to ideology in order to give his life purpose. The scene towards the end of the film in which Reeves, finally stripped of all his mysticism, tells Justin that, “The trick is to live without answers. I think.” could not possibly find its place so effectively anywhere else as in an ‘independent Hollywood’ movie. Existing in opposition to - and yet within - Hollywood, it is often this very contradiction that makes these films shine.