Young Bodies Heal Quickly at 10: Andrew T. Betzer and the Left-Behind Indies

The kind of filmmaking that was once the poster child for independent cinema in America is dead. It’s easy to say that mumblecore is long gone, but that term—for a specific social group at a specific time—is often used so nebulously that it’s ceased to have meaning. Films like Frances Ha are often grouped in, although that film was made for millions of dollars, has an extraordinarily clean digital aesthetic, and could even afford a David Bowie song to rip off a scene from Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang. Frances Ha’s star, Greta Gerwig, is one of the big winners from that generation of DIY talents. Last year she directed the highest-grossing movie of 2023, making almost a billion and a half dollars globally. Meanwhile, her Nights and Weekends co-director Joe Swanberg was working to keep the lights on at the VHS rental shop he was running out of the back of a Chicago pizzeria. There were winners and losers from this moment.
Another directing pair whose fates seem to have split is the Safdie brothers. Benny has been doing well for himself acting and producing, while Josh seems to be unable to get any projects off the ground—perhaps he put too much stock in the brothers staying as a duo. Then there’s the sort of third Safdie, the honorary brother: Ronald Bronstein. Since his feature Frownland debuted in 2007, he hasn’t made another film. Instead, he’s worked with the Safdies on a number of their features, often writing with Josh and editing with Benny.
The Safdies’ dirty, handheld 16mm stylistic preferences both set them apart from their digital contemporaries and made them natural collaborators with Frownland’s DP Sean Price Williams, who had become a hot item by the time they started collaborating with him on Heaven Knows What and Good Time. By this time the brothers had become more professional in their style and more old-school in their aesthetics. They weren’t as interested in new digital realities than in the physical—they have more in common with The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Mean Streets than they do with Hannah Takes the Stairs and Funny Ha Ha.
Williams and the Safdies seem to have been on a similar page aesthetically—by the time we get to their first short together, The Black Balloon, there had already been a similar handheld, filmic mise en scene developed by each artist. Aside from the seven-year process that was making Frownland, Williams also evolved his grainy, handheld 16mm look through his number of collaborations with an all-but forgotten and completely overlooked filmmaker: Andrew T. Betzer.
I’ll be upfront here: I probably would not be familiar with Betzer’s work had it not been for him being friends and former colleagues with a film school professor of mine at Montana State University, Tenzin Phuntsog, who had Betzer Skype into our class once. (I’d venture to guess most cinephiles acquainted with 2000s indie film have only ever seen his name as a PA on Frownland.) I’ve held a deep admiration for Betzer’s work since, in part because of the quality of the works themselves but also the way in which talking to him showed, on a personal level, that being the kind of independent filmmaker that appeared in Fandor collections was an accessible dream. It is part of what makes it so sad that he has not made another feature since his first, back in 2014. But 10 years after what was apparently a disappointment for festival audiences, Young Bodies Heal Quickly deserves another look.
Given a brief description, one might mistake Betzer’s first feature for Williams’ own debut, The Sweet East: A sweltering 16mm mid-Atlantic road trip replete with scorned youth in a fracturing American society, with touches of magical realism and even a prolonged stay with a neo-Nazi. But where The Sweet East often feels held back by its insistence on being a talky film—one feels it is as much for avid podcast listeners as for fans of off-the-beaten path ‘70s cinema—Young Bodies Heal Quickly is anything but chatty. Gabriel Croft plays his protagonist by way of grunts rather than words.
The film opens with Croft climbing through a real barbed wire fence while wearing a red boxing helmet. Betzer cast Croft for this kind of physicality—he had found out about Croft because he was in Robert Greene’s independent wrestling documentary Fake It So Real (a film also shot by Sean Price Williams). The viscerality of Young Bodies Heal Quickly is immediately apparent from this opening scene, but what’s not clear is the specificity of the story. We don’t know who this man is (Croft’s character is credited as “Older brother”), why he’s jumping through this fence, or what the deal with the helmet is. Some of it can be gleaned by the unspoken, but the lack of clear context is strange, and actually adds to the tone of the film; there’s a mysterious quality to all the base and primal masculinity on display.