Logan Lerman comes of age with a spellbinding performance in Indignation

Director: James Schamus (feature debut)

Starring: Logan Lerman, Sarah Gadon, Tracy Letts, Linda Edmond, Danny Burstein.

Rating: ****

Growing against the flow

FOR some time, young American actor Logan Lerman (Fury, Perks Of Being a Wallflower) has been regarded as a highly promising talent.

However, after witnessing his scrupulously precise performance here, most will agree the “promising” tag can be dropped for good. Lerman has arrived as a fully-formed practitioner of his craft.

The polished vehicle spiriting Lerman to the next level is an absorbing, emotionally astute adaptation of a 2008 novel by Philip Roth.

Lerman plays Marcus, an ambitious, intellectually headstrong Jewish student who hits the books hard at a Christian college in 1951 to dodge being drafted to the Korean War.

Though a forensic sense of time and place — and the moral chokehold Marcus and his classmates are living under — is crucial to casting the spell initially cast by Indignation, there is real magic to come as Roth’s story expands.

The centrepiece of the film is an intense, flawlessly scripted 10-minute conversation Marcus shares with an authoritarian college dean (Tracy Letts).

Not only is it one of the standout individual scenes of the year. In the wake of this disarmingly direct verbal parrying, Indignation’s seemingly high-minded concerns suddenly become universally touching.

(Later on, it is doubtful you’ll see the final moments of a film in 2016 “stick the dismount” so exquisitely and so hauntingly, either.)

Lerman’s stirring reading of Marcus turns out to be the prime calling card of Indignation: a detailed portrayal of a young man so intent when it comes to matters of the mind, yet unsure of everything else.