Dir: Jeffrey Blitz | St: Reece Thompson

If you’ve been following recent US indie cinema, Rocket Science may seem a little familiar. The story of a teen outsider with a small but, in his high-school world, debilitating affliction (a stammer) it uses all the ammo in the Sundance movie armoury – separated parents, weird stepbrothers, barking neighbours – to create yet another white-picket survivalist fable, scored with the obligatory alt.rock soundtrack (Broken Social Scene and The Violent Femmes do the honours).

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But in much the same way that Little Miss Sunshine gathered up all the available indie tropes and boiled them down to an accessible, near-Oscar-winning package, so Jeffrey Blitz’s debut creates something affecting and original out of such seemingly well-worn material. Central to its success is the artless Reece Thompson as Hal Hefner, the dweeb inducted into the school debating team by the not-as-philanthropic-as-she-seems Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick), and his attempts, not always successful, to regain his dignity.

Although the film builds to a kind of Rocky-style showdown, Blitz doesn’t follow the usual route for the standard underdog movie. Where other indies trumpet an idealistic right-will-prevail philosophy, Blitz is brave enough to wonder if it won’t, and the gamble pays off in this warm, funny comedy’s poignant last moments.

DAMON WISE