'Blue Like Jazz' struggles with life's uncertainties
"Blue Like Jazz" takes a different view of the Christian experience than most so-called "Christian movies," a label assigned to stories laden with preachy lectures that purport to possess answers to life's questions.
Steve Taylor's movie, based on Donald Miller's best-selling memoir of the same title, takes the opposite approach.
Its main character, a Texas conservative Christian teenager named Don, questions everything: himself, his parents, his religion. Everything.
He sets out on a journey to discover the world outside Texas, and winds up learning more about himself and his relationship with God.
But all that happens quietly, almost invisibly. "Blue Like Jazz" is mostly about embracing the messiness and the uncertainty of life. It's about searching for purpose in a world that doesn't even guarantee there is such a thing.
Nothing comes neatly bundled up in a parable, or exists in a black-and-white vacuum of good or evil. Its story resonates because it feels authentic. Apparently, there are lots of Dons out in the world who relate to Miller's protagonist.
Nineteen-year-old Don, played by Marshall Allman with an all-American, fresh-scrubbed appeal, was prepared to attend Texas Christian University. When he discovers his mother's affair with his Baptist youth pastor, he balks.
He takes up his liberal (and divorced) father's offer to enroll at the liberal Reed College in Portland, Ore.
Don arrives and instantly feels like a classic fish out water. The students seem crazy, bohemian, strange and, yet, fascinating to the Texan.
Attractive girls give away free condoms. Frat guys do dopey things. Political meetings seem to be endless.
Don's first friend, Lauryn (Tania Ramonde) turns out to be a lesbian who knows all about being accepted. Or not.
Don also meets Penny (Claire Holt), a really nice girl who has survived college with her Christian beliefs intact.
But we're never really sure about the Pope (Justin Welborn), an upperclassman who dresses as the pope and runs around campus with a fire raging in his bicycle basket.
Like all students, Don desperately tries to assimilate, to be accepted as one of the students. After repeated attempts - some comical, some embarrassing - he concludes that delving into hypocrisy for the sake of inclusion doesn't work. At least not for him.
I don't want to oversell "Blue Like Jazz." Taylor directs it as a high-end made-for-cable project that prefers to let the actors take the lead in telling the story instead of the camerawork.
"Blue Like Jazz" never achieves the level of a powerful drama. There are no grand epiphanies. No Oscar-baiting tantrums, campus shootings or divine revelations.
It's a story about internal conflict, an infinitely tougher subject to portray in the cinema than war or sports.
Miller himself is an unassuming author and public speaker whose chief asset appears to be candor.
And it is that candor - of a young Christian struggling to reconcile hypocrisy and disappointment with God and religion - that takes up the narrative slack in "Blue Like Jazz" and gives it some punch.
Especially to the doubting Thomases in the audience.
“Blue Like Jazz”
★ ★ ½
Starring: Marshall Allman, Justin Welborn, Tania Raymonde, Claire Holt, Donald Miller
Directed by: Steve Taylor
Other: A Roadside Attractions release. Rated PG-13 for drug use, language and sexual situations. 106 minutes