Imaginary Heroes begins with seventeen year old Tim (Emile Hirsch) discovering his older brother Matt's suicide. In a state of shock, he walks downstairs and tracks blood from his Matt's head all over the kitchen floor. Later, at the funeral, his older sister (Michelle Williams) asks him what it looked like; Tim says it was like a red canyon in the back of his head.

I greatly appreciated the imagery of that metaphor, and the bluntness of its use; it gave me a good feeling about this debut from writer/director Dan Harris, and from those early moments I anticipated a strong drama about teen suicide and its causes and effects. It's one of those highly personal subject matters that's always worthy of a new approach, and as the film began, I thought back briefly to other stories of familial loss; Nani Moretti's The Son's Room, was one that came to mind, and Brad Silberling's Moonlight Mile. In fact, I was particularly reminded of that latter example, and the manner with which it tempered its tragedy with a slightly glossy approach. It also had a feisty mother played by Susan Sarandon who is a direct antecedent to Sandy, the mother in Imaginary Heroes, portrayed by a more broadly peppery Sigourney Weaver. Sandy is an earth-mother-by-way-of-Estee-Lauder, with designer streaks in her hair and sarcastic manner of dispersing maternal advice; the type whose relationship with her son can be summed up in this early line of dialogue: "I think we're the only mother and son in town who can say masturbating without laughing."

I wonder: do mothers and sons really ever talk like that? I'm sure some do, and I'm sure it sounds as much like movie dialogue in real life as it does in the movies. But there are many other exchanges between Sandy and Tim that are sincere and true, and at that point, early in the film, I was still giving the characters the benefit of my doubt, the supsension of my disbelief. Indeed, there was a lot to admire: the subtlety, for example, with which the father character (played by a cast-against-type Jeff Daniels) was developed as a man unable to distinguish between grief and anger; or the relationship between Tim and his sweetly naive girlfriend, which hit just the right notes of confusion and angst. There's a scene at a party where they almost have sex, but the experience turns sour. Tim tells her he doesn't love her, and the look on her face at that moment is heartbreaking and honest, and if the movie had ended right then and there, I would have given it a better review than the one I'm going to have to give it.

Instead, Tim gets in his car, crashes it and breaks his leg. While he's recovering at the hospital a few days later, he meets a troubled young man whose suicide attempts have consistently failed; he explains that he can't bring himself to care for anything in his life and therefore cannot find any reason to go on living.

Let me interrupt this scene description to mention a certain truth about filmmaking: a great director can take a single incident, a single moment even, and spend an indeterminate amound of time exploring it, delving into nuances and aftereffects with subtlety and sensitivity. Cases in point of particular similarity to this picture are the two films I already mentioned; an additional example could be made of Ordinary People, also about the death of an elder son. But in Imaginary Heroes, it is at the aforementioned scene at the hopsital that Harris seems to the bottom of his premise; he gets just about as deep as he's going to, and since this scene occurs roughly thirty minutes into the film, he has a lot of space to fill to hit the feature length mark.

Well, he fills it, all right.If you were to make a checklist of melodramatic cliches, this movie would fulfill them and possibly even do your list one better. Of course, cliches in and of themselves are not a bad thing; Eastwood's great Million Dollar Baby is rife with them, but the difference between that film and this one, at least as far as melodrama goes, is that the conventions are used well. In Imaginary Heroes, Harris doesn't just employ the cliches, but extrapolates upon them, to the extent that, vis a vis the interconnecting web of developments, an entirely incidental incest subplot is created. This is in addition to the other subplots that actually are given credence in the script, including but not limited to marital infidelity, bisexuality, physical abuse, drug use, parternal aloofness- what else? Just as cliches can be well used, these multifarious developments could have been made to work had Harris introduced them earlier in the picture, so that the characters might have time to work them out, to learn, to grow from them; as it is, though, they come faster and more fiercely as the denoument draws closer, until they've accumulated into a pile no amount of climactic hug therapy can disipate.

Now, amongst all this dramatic detritus are frequent doses of what made those early moments so wonderful; scenes between Tim and Sandy, in particular, or the late appearance of Kurt Cobain's visage, used as a symbol of teenage despair; and also moments of wonderful wit that would remind one of how humor is one of the best ways of dealing with tragedy if the tragedy hadn't already been so sidelined in the story. And then there's one scene in the middle of film where everything truly, magically starts to work again; a scene which is so good that I thought it might miraculously make up for the wrong turns preceeding it. It occurs after a New Years' Eve party, where Tim and his best friend have taken a liberal dose ecstacy. I won't reveal what happens, but it's the one part of the film where the characters seem to follow through on their own impulses; it's almost as if, for just a moment, they manage to escape the overly manipulative control of their creator, and in this moment of freedom, they, and the film, truly shine.

Then the scene is over, and Harris unfortunately rescinds that brief promise of something great. It's too bad, because he is a talented guy; I know this because he was one of the co-writers of another film about imaginary heroes, X-Men 2. That was an outstanding action film, largely because of its nuanced script and careful character development. He's clearly not quite as adept at utlizing that same sensitivity on a less grandiose concept; in the absence of explosions and mutant powers, he's had to turn to the worst tearjerker cliches to fill in the space between all the good, honest moments that were so prevalent in the opening scenes of the film and, briefly, right smack dab in the middle.