About Blue Boy
Synopsis
Seventeen-year-old Kenny lives in a rundown track home with his father, but every morning he rides his bike into the wealthier part of town for his lifeguarding job. Invisible to the moneyed moms and girls who populate the country club Kenny spends his work hours stoned, fantasizing about the women around him. One in particular, Mrs. Jordan, has always caught his eye. After an act of heroism brings them together he finds himself alone with her and decides to try to act on his daydreams.
Director’s Statement
I didn’t set out to adapt a short story into a film. I was reading through short stories, three or four a night trying to understand the rhythms of what makes a great piece resonate when I found Kevin Canty’s BLUE BOY in The Granta Book of American Stories. It stopped me in my tracks.
Kenny reminded me of exactly what it meant to be seventeen. I grew up economically out-of-place in a wealthy neighborhood — the son of the Junior High Schoolteacher — and with that came the understanding of the invisible lines money draws and an understanding of the desires to cross them.
The story seemed simple on the surface – a confused kid comes face to face with his fantasy, reaches out and faces the consequences – but behind that lay this complex wellspring of emotions. In those emotions a more detailed story emerges, a story of two people isolated and filled with longing brought together by an odd turn and their awkward, painful attempt to connect.
The exchanges between Mrs. Jordan and Kenny have an aching quality that reminds me of some of my favorite films — Kenneth Lonnergan’s You Can Count on Me or Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Love – in which the gaps and false starts speak more to the internal space of the characters than anything else.
It’s my hope that this film will bring the audience into those gaps evoking Kenny’s emotional isolation and shaping this feeling until the last moment, when he and Mrs. Jordan finally connect.
