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Oscar Boyson was a producer on the Safdie brothers' head-spinning nervous-breakdown movies "Good Time" and "Uncut Gems." Now, directing and cowriting his own first feature, Boyson manifests some of the Safdies' spine-tingling approach to spikey material with a picture that was initially turned down for competition at the Sundance and South by Southwest film festivals. Finally, one year after its completion, the movie is opening in theaters.

"Our Hero, Balthazar" focuses on the legion of Gen Z youth bobbling around in the nastier corners of the internet. It brushes up against the subject of school shootings and, despite its fairly disturbing nature, it also offers a few passing laughs.

The picture is fueled by two exceptional performances by Jaeden Martell and Asa Butterfield. Martell (of the "It" movies and "Knives Out") plays a dweeb-adjacent rich kid named Balthazar Malone, who is ferried between his mother's ultra-luxe penthouse home and his private Manhattan high school by the family chauffeur, and is otherwise occupied lobbing iPhone videos out onto the internet -- overwrought clips in which he blubbers and whines to his followers about the school shootings in "this awful country" ("We're fighting for our lives here!") and demonstrates a useful ability to shed tears at will. (Asked at one point if this performative crying is actually real, he says, "That's a good question.")

While participating in an "active shooter" drill at his school, Balthazar (or "Balty," as he prefers to be called) strikes up a chat with a non-weird classmate named Eleanor (Pippa Knowles, a star). In one of the movie's most boldly icky scenes, Balty takes Eleanor back to his family's penthouse to show her some real-life school-shooting video he's harvested off the web; as it's playing, and we begin to hear sounds of slaughter, he maneuvers his hand onto her thigh and she erupts in disgust.

Meanwhile, poking around online, Balty has encountered a person with the ominous handle "deathdealer_16," who says he is actually planning to carry out a school shooting. Balty manages to contact this character and is soon confiding in him: "I'm having kind of a bad day," he says. "My girlfriend called me psycho." "That happens every day for me," says his new pal. "Except no girlfriend."

The movie gathers punch and texture as the story follows Balty down to Texas to meet the aspiring mass shooter, whose real name is Solomon Jackson (Butterfield). Solomon is a bitter, redheaded loser who lives with his grandmother and bears the crippling burden of dealing with his repellent father, Beaver (Chris Bauer), a motivational hustler and smalltime porn star who traffics in a dubious testosterone-enhancing substance called Thrush. (The logo on the container is an angry clenched fist.)

There's a violent drop-in at a local bar, and a visit to the shabby convenience store where Solomon worked for a bit before getting fired for creeping everybody out. ("You're a fuckin' incel," says one of the clerks by way of bidding him goodbye.) We know the end is drawing near when Balty and Solomon make their way to the grandmother's house, and Solomon brings out some of the guns his dodgy father has given him. (Their serial numbers have all been filed off.) The movie's conclusion is pretty much perfect.

Martell and Butterfield are unimprovably good, carefully underplaying the homoerotic tingle between their characters. And they don't overdo the occasional laugh line. When Balty wonders if he might be able to somehow help Solomon with his murder problem, he asks if he's lonely. "Of course I'm lonely," Solomon says. "I'm a fucking school shooter."

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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