Cyrus

The Duplass brothers made a certain impression a few years back with a rambling road movie, The Puffy Chair, an exercise in the genre of talkative, semi-improvised, ultra-low-budget American independent pictures that was wittily dubbed "mumblecore" by Eric Masunaga, a sound engineer who'd worked on several of them. Now the Duplasses have come to Hollywood with a reasonable budget and a strong cast provided by two brothers who work at the opposite end of the industrial spectrum, Ridley and Tony Scott. The result is the oddly touching Cyrus , starring plug-ugly character actor John C Reilly as a sad, long-divorced, freelance book editor. His considerate ex-wife (Catherine Keener) takes him to a party, hoping he'll find a girl and he hooks up with the attractive, sweet-natured Marisa Tomei. But it transpires she has an overweight 21-year-old son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill, hitherto the star of gross Judd Apatow comedies), a possessive, childlike musician who sets out to provide impediments to the true love between his mother and this intruder. The Duplasses' technical clumsiness is clearly a badge of authenticity and their well-acted movie is affecting and truthful.