I've seen four performances in the past few months that have completely transfixed me, in some way moreso than the films that feature them. I'm thinking of Romain Duris, precisely erasing the delineation between anger and inspiration in The Beat That My Heart Skipped; Joseph Gordon Levitt, burning alive in Mysterious Skin; Amy Adams, somehow pirouetting away from the arch in Junebug; and now a young man named Lou Pucci in Thumbsucker, who revitalizes that very frequently exhausted landscape of the Teenage Wasteland, reminding us that the various tenets of angst - such as stomping out of one's classroom, or telling one's would-be girlfriend that 'nothing's wrong' when something very clearly is - need not be considered stock, simply because they've been expressed so many times by stock characters.

Thumbsucker is a wildly uneven but almost wonderful debut from music video director and graphic designer Mike Mills. It is unwieldy, but gracefully so; it lurches from one episode to another and feels twice as long as it actually is, and yet it does not overstay its welcome, and those episodes are not incohesive. In so much that Mills wrote the screenplay and directed the actors and created the film's organic, slightly whimsical aesthetic style, I give him credit for the picture's success; but the best choice he made was casting Pucci. What he offers this film is precisely what the one other picture I've seen him in, last month's very similarly themed, somewhat similarly titled, mostly unsuccessful The Chumscrubber, lacked. He is on screen for nearly every scene in the film, and is the unfailing constant around which the various and sometimes disparate elements of the narrative revolve. Whenever the film threatens to capsize, he keeps it tonally afloat.

The title refers specifically to the odd habit of Pucci's character, Justin, which has endured since his infancy. When he's stressed, he sucks his thumb, and this tendency incurs the not uncompassionate wrath of his father (Vincent D'Onofrio) and the concern of his orthodontist (Keanu Reeves). He is cured of this habit early in the film, but what the adults in the film do not consider is that it was not a problem in and of itself but a response to a problem; thus, a succession of addictions - Ritalin, marijuana, sex - take the place of this initial oral fixation.

These crutches serve to illustrate a malaise that is too general to pinpoint. Justin, in a sense, seems to reach a satisfactory conclusion, a freedom from his travails, at the film's conclusion, but it doesn't take much foresight to see that this denouement is only a step in the right direction on his part. One of the faults of teen 'issue' movies is that they assume, essentially, that given problems have given solutions; this is not the case, and one of the things Thumbuscker gets right is that these problems don't necessarily go away. That angst is so often associated with teenagers is simply because the issues it describes first (and most prominently) rear their head during adolescence, and so it is that Justin's problems are cast against those of the adults in his life: his father and orthodontist, and also his mother (Tilda Swinton) and debate teacher (Vince Vaughn) and, briefly, a drug addled TV actor (Benjamin Bratt) who is a patient at the hospital where Swinton works. All of these adults have their own problems, their own habits, and in a way they all look to Justin for assistance -or, at least, for assurance - even as they attempt to help him; this is most evident, naturally, in his relationship with his parents, who request that he address them by their first names because 'mom' and 'dad' make them feel old. It's important to note that the qualities and arcs of the adult characters are tangents; but they are tangential to Justin, and not unto themselves.

The performances of D'Onofrio and Swinton which give credence to these tangents are beautifully nuanced things; Vaughn gets the chance to tone down his schtick of late, and Reeves is hilarious in a sad sort of way. But we're familiar with all of these actors; we expect nothing less than beauty and nuance from D'Onofrio and Swinton, and there's a small thrill to be had in seeing mainstream names like Vaughn and (especially) Reeves undertake material like this. We know them, and appreciate what they have to offer here. But Lou Taylor Pucci is not familiar, and neither is Kelli Garner, who plays his almost-girlfriend, and neither are the three actors from other films I named at the outset, all of whom have impressed me to a greater extent than their more recognizable counterparts.

That such striking work is coming from relatively (if not completely) anonymous faces in the cinema is nothing surprising in a medium that is always hungry for new talent, for the next flavor of the month. But what struck me, watching these performances, is the degree to which acting is a personal art, and the potential which stardom has to subvert the art. We generally regard actors as gifted arbiters of a directors' vision and/or personality - but as much as that may be true, those gifts are very much the actors' own, and when we, as audience members, get used to a face, I think that we cease to recognize this. The ubiquity of Nicole Kidman, for example, has in some ways diminished our ability to appreciate her inarguable skill; likewise, the orthodontist in this film is not just an orthodontist, but an orthodontist played by Keanu Reeves.

For his work in this film, Pucci deservedly won the Best Actor award at the Berlin Film Festival and a special jury prize at Sundance; he will not be anonymous for long. But I hope, perhaps selfishly, that he doesn't actually achieve stardom, at least not in the traditional sense; after all,Thumbsucker comes at the end of a summer that has challenged, to however marginal an extent, traditional notions of what stardom means to audiences. Sure-things have failed at the box office, Tom Cruise has fallen from grace, Julia Roberts has announced her retirement, and it is exciting to consider the possibilities of young actors rising in an industry where 'the next big thing' might not have the same appeal that it once did, where such exciting talent might thrive without risk of being subverted and made mundane by the mainstream. I want to see more films like Thumbsucker, and I want to see more actors like Lou Pucci continuing to act in them.