This is a rather bizarre coming-of-age comic drama that demands your patience watching it as it is not the easiest of films to relate too. It’s the feature film debut of its creator/director/producer and star Mark Blane, who plays immature 26-year-old Mark, and it starts as he is driving with his mother cross-country to start a new life in New York.
You can quickly tell that he has inherited many of his controlling mother’s neuroses ( a scene stealing Patricia Richardson,) and so he feels the need to perpetually lie to escape her and get on with his imaginary life. He arrives in the city with a few scant possessions and nowhere to live and a fictitious job as an art gallery receptionist. For the first time in his life he also has no therapist and his supply of pills that calm him down and able him to function is fast running out.
The only person in town he vaguely knows is someone he was at school years ago and fortunately has a spare room in the apartment he shares with others. Now ensconced there, the only work that Mark can find is babysitting 6 year old Milo (Joseph Seuffert). It doesn’t pay enough to over his rent, so he is a always in debt, but as he and Milo both have childlike minds, they instantly bond.
Mark is a gay virgin too, and a lot of his day he is imagining a life with his fantasy Mr Leather Man. He is so obsessed with him that when he meets a real man in the nearby Community Garden who obviously likes him, Mark really had no idea of how to respond or behave.
Despite all his failings (and a weak script that wanders too far from the point too often) Mark finally discovers his ability as an artist, an (almost) functioning member of society who is also able to have a romantic relationship. Blane is unquestionably fascinating and so completely absorbed in this character that he has lovingly created, and may even be based on him.
It definitely stretches one’s patience on more than one occasion. However the joy (!) of being a film critic is that we are required to see the whole movie to the very last frame, and in this case, it turns out to be a blessing as the ending was one of the best parts.
