The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Prediction

Mild:| (learn more)

Festival Year

2008 (click here to see all competition films from this year)

Category

Dramatic Competition

Cast

Jon Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sienna Miller, Mena Suvari, Nick Nolte

Non-Cast Credits

Rawson Marshall Thurber, Michael Chabon, Michael London, Jason Mercer, Thor Benander, Rawson Marshall Thurber, Michael Barrett, Barbara Tulliver, Maher Ahmad

Description

Based on Michael Chabon's influential novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh seductively captures that moment when getting derailed from complacency opens your mind to the endless possibilities life has to offer.

Set in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s, the story chronicles the last true summer of Art Bechstein's youth. Stuck in a dead-end job working for his eccentric sometime-girlfriend, and forced into an endless series of airless dinners with his mobster father, Art begins to believe that perhaps he doesn't even exist at all.

What begins as a mundane summer is quickly interrupted when he encounters a beautiful debutante and her lusty boyfriend. Together they reveal a side of Art�and Pittsburgh�that he has never known. As the summer boils on and their adventures darken, Art decides to risk everything to preserve his newfound paradise: he thrusts himself headlong into the blurring boundaries of family, friendship, and love.

Writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber and his immensely gifted cast bring Chabon's pages to life with passion, humor, and pathos, wholly capturing the joys and pains that come with encountering people who change your life forever. This movie, a stunning study of human interaction and liberation, is for anyone who has ever been rocked�for a moment or for a lifetime�by someone truly extraordinary.

Reviewer

Trevor Groth (see other films reviewed by the same reviewer)

Film Takes Pace.