Breaking Bad had Badger. Thumper has Beaver. Hard drugs make lovable saps out of all its low-level dealers named after furry critters—this innocuousness isn’t a mistake. TO put it broadly, as of late, crime entertainment has been slowly dismantling the romanticized idea of cooks, kingpins and high-level dealers, instead emphasizing the unrewarding workaday nature of its entry-level employees. These dealers, recruited out of high school or younger, become indentured servants to their drug, their social circle or both: It’s the only way out of their circumstances and it’s certainly the only way to keep getting a fix. Thumper, a film about such a community, withholds its primary plot device until it visually explains its environment, its town and its drugs.
The hard-nosed drama begins by building the lives it touches before introducing the idea that we’re seeing such drama from inside of a performance. Beaver (Daniel Webber), a high schooler roped into the dealing scene, isn’t Thumper’s main character at all; rather, the main character is the girl Beaver invites to get drunk at an abandoned factory, a date which tells you more about the working class town than its unemployment percentage. She’s Kat Carter (Eliza Taylor)—well, not really. She’s actually an undercover Narc, 21 Jump Street-ing in the most dangerous circles to try to find out the origin of the community’s disproportionate amount of overdose deaths.
Thumper weaves a few junkyard love stories into its tangled web of drug industry tension and deception, sympathizing with even its cruelest characters. This isn’t a movie whose grit comes from its subject matter. The grimy lawns full of furniture that doesn’t seem to belong on them, let alone inside of the overstuffed homes that threaten to topple over, signal that proud criminals (even the kids) could be natural consequences of this environment. Powerful set design (and what must be location scouting) show a world on the verge of breaking, of struggle that will never admit to it, of contrast when Kat ventures back to her “real life” in the suburbs. The cleanliness, the spaciousness, the bright green lawns and khakis of privilege are startling.
Over the course of her investigation into Beaver’s ring, led by a war veteran cook played by Pablo Schreiber in one of the most effortlessly frightening performances ever to make me still feel sorry for the character, facades keep building up and breaking down. Beaver wants to impress Kat and ingratiate himself into the inner circle of his drug affiliates, with Webber adding such pained earnestness to his naive desperation for acceptance that his mopey puppy face overwhelms his attempts at being hard.