MY FRIEND DAHMER (2017)

Studio:       FilmRise
Director:    Marc Meyers
Writer:       Marc Meyers
Producer:  Jody Girgenti, Marc Meyers, Adam Goldworm, Michael Merlob, Milan Chakraborty
Stars:     Ross Lynch, Anne Heche, Dallas Roberts, Alex Wolff, Tommy Nelson, Vincent Kartheiser, Harrison Holzer, Miles Robbins

Review Score:

---

Summary:

Classmates unknowingly witness the evolution of a future serial killer during Jeffrey Dahmer’s senior year of high school.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

During his junior year of high school, Jeffrey Dahmer becomes obsessed with a jogger who runs past his house three days a week. Dahmer comes home from school one day to find his mother Joyce working with an interior designer, Mr. Burlman, whose palsy affects his speaking and movement.

Dahmer occupies his free time in a shed outside where he dissolves animals using acid provided by his chemist father Lionel. Dahmer creeps out two boys by showing them his collection of roadkill carcasses and bones. Lionel later trashes the hut, insisting that his son find more appropriate activities and make friends.

At school, classmate John “Derf” Backderf, an aspiring cartoonist, is assigned to be Dahmer’s lab partner. Dahmer takes an interest in homosexual student Oliver, but eventually ignores him out of fear when the boy is repeatedly bullied.

During senior year, Dahmer imitates Mr. Burlman when a teacher asks him a question. Dahmer’s spastic impression causes his classmates to laugh. Dahmer begins repeatedly acting epileptic for the attention.

Finding Dahmer’s disruptive antics amusing, Derf invites Dahmer to join his friends Neil and Mike at lunch in the cafeteria. The boys form a “Dahmer Fan Club” that encourages Dahmer to act spastic, called “doing a Dahmer,” for their entertainment.

While fishing with Derf and Neil, Dahmer spontaneously stabs and cuts up a fish instead of throwing it back in the water. When the shocked boys ask why he did it, Dahmer responds that he wanted to see what the fish’s insides looked like.

Neil is assigned to photograph school club group pictures for the yearbook. Dahmer suggests a prank that puts him in the photo for every single club wearing a dour frown. When the supervising teacher later discovers Dahmer in all of the photos, she uses a marker to black out his face.

Dahmer fakes another seizure at the grocery store where Derf works, which nearly gets Derf fired. Outside, Dahmer spots the jogger, whom he still stalks, and learns from Neil that the jogger is Dr. Matthews.

With ongoing marital problems between Lionel and mentally unstable Joyce creating increasingly tumultuous tension at home, Dahmer steals his father’s booze. Dahmer quits the school band and begins showing up for class drunk.

Odd stoner Lloyd Figg cuts himself in front of the boys. Derf warns Dahmer to stay away from Figg, but Dahmer is fascinated by the blood. Dahmer takes Figg into the woods, but leaves when Figg produces a gun and insists on playing Russian roulette.

Dahmer finds a dead possum in the road and cuts it open.

The classmates take a field trip to Washington D.C. Dahmer is assigned to a hotel room with black football player Charlie Smith. Dahmer is attracted to Charlie’s physique, but alarms Charlie when he wonders aloud if a black man’s insides are the same color as his.

Posing as a reporter for the school newspaper, Dahmer successfully arranges for he, Derf, Neil, Mike, and Derf’s girlfriend Penny to meet Vice President Walter Mondale. Dahmer comes home from the field trip to learn that his father moved into a motel and his parents plan to divorce.

Dahmer makes an appointment for a physical with Dr. Matthews. Dahmer gets an erection during his hernia exam. Dahmer then goes home and masturbates.

After more bizarre behavior from Dahmer, Neil openly wonders if their group of friends mistreats him. Derf suggests Dahmer is simply a weirdo. Dahmer continues drinking and gradually stops hanging out with the other boys.

Frustrated after his mother ignores him, Dahmer lures a dog into the woods with the intention of cutting the animal open. However, Dahmer lets the dog go.

Dahmer fantasizes about lying in bed with Dr. Matthews’ dead body.

Derf raises money from classmates to sponsor one final spastic performance from Dahmer at a local mall. Neil refuses to participate, and suggests they just leave Dahmer alone. Dahmer harasses people and storeowners throughout the mall, though Derf begins suspecting that Dahmer is losing control.

Dahmer waits in the bushes with a baseball bat, fully prepared to finally beat the jogger to death. However, Dr. Matthews fails to jog past Dahmer that day.

Two children discover an eviscerated dog carcass in the woods.

Dahmer asks a freshman girl named Bridget to prom. At the dance, Neil apologizes for what happened at the mall, even though he wasn’t there. During a dance next to Derf and Penny, Dahmer abruptly excuses himself, leaving Bridget alone at the dance while he goes to a fast food restaurant and then home.

Instead of attending Dahmer’s graduation, Joyce takes Dahmer’s brother Dave to her mother’s because she does not want to see Lionel. Left alone in the house, Dahmer has an emotional breakdown. After the ceremony, Lionel gifts Dahmer his car.

On his way home after picking up his final paycheck, Derf sees Dahmer walking along the road. Dahmer accepts Derf’s offer of a lift home. The two boys have an awkward conversation about their college plans as well as about blood that Derf observes on Dahmer’s hands. Derf offers to give Dahmer the sketches he drew of him throughout school, but Dahmer declines.

After some coaxing, Derf agrees to go inside and share one beer with Dahmer. Derf gets a strange vibe and leaves hurriedly. Dahmer follows behind with a baseball bat, but Derf gets in his car and quickly drives away.

Dahmer is next seen offering a ride to hitchhiker Steven Hicks, who would become Jeffrey Dahmer’s first murder victim.

---

Review:

It’s impossible to stare at John Wayne Gacy in clown makeup and associate his image with anything other than unfathomable evil.  Or to see the crazed gaze of Richard Ramirez and remember that his empty eyes once belonged to a child.

Somewhere along their paths to serial killing infamy, such men followed forks that turned them away from normalcy and turned them into monsters.  What did their younger lives look like before madness led to murder?  What must it be like to be someone who knew them then, a living victim of eternal wonderment over exactly how a murderer was made?

John “Derf” Backderf has answers to both questions.  Growing up in Ohio as a classmate of Jeffrey Dahmer’s, Backderf witnessed the tumult in the notorious killer’s high school years firsthand, and recounted the experience in his exceptionally enlightening graphic novel.  Adapted into film form by writer/director Marc Meyers, “My Friend Dahmer” tells a tragic tale of a teen as invisibly inconsequential as any other, yet fated to be remembered as anything but.

“My Friend Dahmer” plays like a longform “Freaks and Geeks” episode replacing everything funny with portent that is frightening.  Dahmer is awkward, fumbling, goofy, and confused.  In short, he is outwardly an ordinary 17-year-old lost in a haze of uncertain identity.  The unsettling character study remains haunting from prologue to epilogue precisely because of how eerily relatable it feels.

Ross Lynch’s casually chilling performance captures Dahmer fighting to fit in only to find that once he is seemingly there, he still isn’t satisfied.  Dahmer is savvy enough to sense that his acceptance as class clown, perpetuated when Derf’s closer pals form a “Dahmer Fan Club” to encourage his disruptive behavior, is not equal to acceptance for who he is, much less for the person he is struggling to be or not be.

Knowing how Dahmer’s adult story unfolds puts ominous import into each otherwise innocuous event onscreen.  Every stare, every action, every thought masked by a dour expression provides pause to mull if this is another crossroads that could have ended in a different destination.

Hopelessness bleeds into every scene.  In another context, watching a fearless student impressively finagle a meeting with Vice President Walter Mondale might be charmingly fun.  Yet we are actually witnessing Dahmer developing the silvertongued skills that would later lure victims into his home.  Sadness seeps into the sight of those by his side being cheerfully oblivious to the horror being born.

It’s unclear if the movie has a firm opinion on whether or not Jeff could have been prevented from becoming Dahmer.  Maybe it doesn’t matter much since he wasn’t.  It would be reckless regardless to put the onus on classmates who took odd antics for a laugh, not as irrefutable evidence of greater danger to come.  Innumerable possibilities are in play including the broken marriage of Dahmer’s parents, his mother’s mental illness, repressed homosexuality, and out of control urges to see the insides of animals.

“My Friend Dahmer” bites off quite a bit, and not all of it is chewed.  In giving much more of the movie to Dahmer than to Derf, the narrative frame’s focus is squarely on the title’s third word when the first two are just as fascinating.  Certain scenes selected for inclusion thus do not always tap the same theme.  If “My Friend Dahmer” were leaner, its rhythm would be more lithe.

Derf’s recollections no less effectively depict Jeffrey Dahmer as a next-door kid who could have been anyone’s classmate.  His story accomplishes a brilliant feat in presenting this particular slice of Dahmer’s life.  By disassociating Dahmer from the crimes he would commit, his character is shaped as a pitiably sad personality instead of a purely vile being.  “My Friend Dahmer” doesn’t dismiss the man he became, nor does it beg for “poor Jeff” sympathy.  Rather, the plea is to consider how he was created through conscious choice as well as troubling circumstances, and how common those conditions could be.

Review Score:  80

---