louder than bombs movie reviews

Louder Than Bombs

Joachim Trier ’s “Louder Than Bombs” is interested in the intersection between grief and memory, and how difficult it is to capture both either through photography or film. It is a movie that comments on its own purpose (as co-writer Eskil Vogt ’s “ Blind ” did as well) by making one of its most essential characters a conflict area photographer, someone who once lamented the difficulty in maintaining focus on the specific people she chronicles and not turning them into universal examples. Trier, a masterful filmmaker who has already delivered must-sees in “ Oslo, August 31 ” and “ Reprise ,” navigates an incredibly tricky minefield of mourning, regret and the detailed minutiae that makes up our lives. It is a statement on life and death that opens with a newborn baby’s hand but is primarily about how we process loss. Sometimes its meandering approach can feel a bit more detached than in Trier’s best work, but this is ultimately a delicate, complex film that lingers, unpacking itself in your mind. You remember it in the same kind of fragmented images that haunt its characters.

The baby hand belongs to the new son of Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), a birth that has turned his father Gene ( Gabriel Byrne , doing his best work since “In Treatment”) into a grandpa and his brother Conrad (Devin Druid) into an uncle. The arrival of a new branch in this family tree spurns memories of the lost matriarch of this clan, Isabelle ( Isabelle Huppert ), but it also sends Jonah off on his own unique path. Major events like birth and death have a way of redefining the way we perceive the world, and not in a treacly moral-message-movie way, but even in just the way we practically interact with one another. Perhaps realizing that being a father really closes a chapter on his youth, Jonah rekindles an affair with someone from his past, a woman named Erin ( Rachel Brosnahan ), who happens to be losing her mother.

Meanwhile, the younger Conrad is adrift. He doesn’t have many friends in high school, and can’t connect with his father, who is hiding the fact that he’s sleeping with Conrad’s teacher, Hannah ( Amy Ryan ). Gene tries to call Conrad, and even follows him around town to see what he’s doing. When he reaches him and asks him where he is, Conrad, sitting alone on a swing set, lies and says he’s with friends. It breaks a father’s heart. Conrad is fascinated by a girl in his class named Melanie ( Ruby Jerins ), sometimes even thinking she’s the magical key to his future. Trier’s film even dips into magical realism, such as when Conrad moves his hand like a magician and Melanie’s hair blows in the wind. Sometimes, especially in our most egocentric teen years, we think we can make the object of affection’s mind move because want it to. In a sense, the world revolves around Conrad—his unaware crush, his avatars in the online game he plays every night, his grief over the loss of his mother—and his journey in “Louder Than Bombs” is one of learning that other people have needs, wants and secrets as well.

A story is coming out in the  New York Times that will tell “the true story” about Isabelle, who died in a car accident. Did she kill herself? Was she meeting a lover? Jonah and Gene know the truth but have kept it from Conrad, and they disagree over whether or not he’s ready to learn it.

How do we remember those we lost? It’s often not like the big moments of typical Hollywood cinema but a minor one, like Conrad’s beautiful memory of his mother pretending not to see him hiding behind some clothes on a line. And how do we capture grief? Can photography, fiction or film possibly convey that which cannot really be put into words? Trier wisely knows the limitations of his form, even including a line like, “Mom once showed me how she could change the meaning of a picture by framing it differently.” He has not made a movie that purports to have any answers, doing what Isabelle did in that he frames a specific story for universal purpose.

Trier’s film is at its best when it’s graceful and simple. Working with regular cinematographer Jakob Ihre , he’s very interested in the humanity of his characters, returning to images of hair, eyes, kissing mouths. The film is surprisingly striking visually, finding beauty in both cheerleader bodies hurtling through the air and a car that has just crashed head-on into a truck. Ola Fløttum’s minimal, effective score works subtly to add another layer of grief that doesn’t feel manipulative or overdone.

Sometimes Trier’s approach can edge into directionless and I wanted parts of “Louder Than Bombs” to feel more emotionally raw. It’s a film that’s remarkably interior, as Jonah and Conrad’s internal monologues are raging in ways that an author would be able to convey but a filmmaker has to find different ways to do so. In one remarkable scene, Jonah reads aloud a collection of notes that his brother has saved on his laptop about random feelings, stats about his day, and general details of life. Sometimes Trier’s film feels like a riff on that document, capturing fragments of memory for the record. When it’s done, Jonah says something else that feels like a meta-commentary on the film itself: “It’s really weird, but interesting. It’s really … it’s really good.”

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

• Jesse Eisenberg as Jonah
• Devin Druid as Conrad Reed
• David Strathairn as Richard Weissman
• Rachel Brosnahan as Erin
• Gabriel Byrne as Gene Reed
• Amy Ryan as Hannah Brennan
• Isabelle Huppert as Isabelle Joubert Reed
• Joachim Trier

Cinematographer

• Ola Fløttum
• Olivier Bugge Coutté

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Review: In ‘Louder Than Bombs,’ a Father and Sons Grieving

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By A.O. Scott

• April 7, 2016

“ Louder Than Bombs ,” the first English-language film by the Norwegian director Joachim Trier ( “Reprise,” “Oslo, August 31st” ), is disarmingly quiet, not unlike the Smiths album that shares its title. Buried or deflected emotion — conveyed through mordant remarks, pregnant glances, long stretches of silence — can generate more impact than explosive drama. This counts as both an insight and a strategy: Mr. Trier’s direction is as restrained and tense as the behavior of his characters, who suffer without making too much noise about it until they seem ready to explode.

Movie Review: ‘Louder Than Bombs’

The times film critic a. o. scott reviews “louder than bombs.”.

They do most of their suffering in a leafy Hudson River town near New York City. Gene (Gabriel Byrne), a schoolteacher and former actor, drives his Volvo to work and tries to communicate with his teenage son, Conrad (Devin Druid). It’s been a few years since the boy’s mother, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a well-known war photographer, died in a car crash, and he has withdrawn into video games and the kind of sullenness that is either perfectly normal or wildly alarming in a male adolescent.

Conrad’s older brother, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), a newly fledged sociology professor with a newborn daughter, arrives to help his father sort out material for a retrospective of Isabelle’s work. The three men, joined by Isabelle in flashbacks that are folded without warning into a mostly linear narrative, do their best to manage their grief and stay out of one another’s way. Gene is consoled by his secret relationship with Hannah (Amy Ryan), a younger colleague, who is Conrad’s English teacher. Jonah pretends he’s not freaked out by fatherhood. Conrad develops a crush on a cheerleader named Melanie (Ruby Jerins), the kind of girl who would never look twice at a diffident, nerdy kid like him.

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Movie Reviews

A photographer's family left behind in 'louder than bombs'.

Mark Jenkins

Devin Druid and Gabriel Byrne in Louder Than Bombs . Courtesy of The Orchard hide caption

Devin Druid and Gabriel Byrne in Louder Than Bombs .

Near the end of Louder than Bombs , Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier's first English-language film, a narrator arrives to inform us that one of the characters will remember that particular moment years later. The intrusion is unexpected, but perhaps less so for people who've seen Trier's 2006 debut, Reprise . That playfully serious movie was about the making of a writer's consciousness, so its literary flourishes were apt.

In their clever but ultimately disappointing latest film, Trier and regular co-writer Eskil Vogt turn their novelistic style to the saga of a war photographer and her family. Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert) is dead when the story begins, but she appears in flashbacks and dream sequences. Left behind is Gene (Gabriel Byrne), who was once an actor but became a high-school teacher in a New York suburb so the couple's two sons would have one parent with a normal life.

Gene's older son, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) is now a college professor with a wife and a brand new baby (named, of course, Isabelle). His younger brother, Conrad (Devin Druid), is a sullen teenager who initially seems the more troubled of the two. That Dad teaches at the school Conrad attends is not making things easier.

An exhibition of Isabelle's photographs is planned, and Jonah devotes himself to it, apparently as a way of escaping his wife and daughter. With the show comes a proposed article by one of Isabelle's former colleagues (David Strathairn). He may reveal things about the late photog that Gene and Jonah would prefer stay private — and that Conrad doesn't even know. But dad and big brother's attempts to shield the boy just make him more resentful.

This is a fairly conventional domestic melodrama, twisted interestingly if not always profoundly with tricky storytelling. Handheld camera creates intimacy and off-kilter motion, and reflections in windows and mirrors are both visual and psychological motifs. The family members' glimpses of each other each are fragmented, detached, and sometimes accidental.

Trier rhymes scenes to show how different characters deceive each other the same way, and sometimes with the same words. Most elaborately, he twice stages a sequence in which Gene follows Conrad on his after-school rounds. The first time, we see the events from the father's viewpoint, and the son seems unaware that he's under observation. Then we see that Conrad knew he was being watched, and tried to script his movements to suit Gene's preconceptions.

Sometimes, parent and child meet in an alternate universe. Conrad escapes into video games, so Gene adopts a game avatar and meets his son online. (The outcome is darkly comic.) For his computer ploy, Conrad has unearthed an old clip of his dad in a movie — it's a scene from a 1987 comedy, Hello Again , in which Byrne plays against Shelley Long — that he proudly shows to an incredulous Jonah.

The movie's title is likely from an album by the Smiths, one of several alt-rock acts referenced in Trier and Vogt's work. (In the Vogt-directed Blind , two characters are linked by a Morrissey album.) But the phrase comes from Elizabeth Smart, who's among Morrissey's many female literary inspirations.

That's ironic, because women are at best ghostly presences in Louder Than Bombs . Isabelle is actually dead, and the other female characters — Gene's secret lover, Conrad's unrequited crush, and both Jonah's wife and his ex-girlfriend — scarcely exist.

They're muses, not people, which may be why one of the film's final hints is that Conrad — like Reprise 's protagonists — will grow up to be an autobiographical writer. Even when making a family drama, Trier's essential subject is the self-absorption of the creative male.

Louder Than Bombs

By David Fear

Screen grief usually comes in two flavors: full-frontal-assault emotional (wrenching of hands, rending of garments) and uncomfortably numb (stoic thousand-yard stares, lone tears silently trailing down cheeks). Filmgoers will sense they’re getting the slow-and-low version in Joachim Trier’s tale of mourning right after the lights go up on a posthumous highlight reel of a deceased conflict photographer (Isabelle Huppert). Her husband, Gene (Gabriel Byrne), nods solemnly at the tribute, set to play in front of a prestigious exhibit devoted to his late wife’s work. Then her journalistic colleague (David Strathairn) tells the widower that he’s doing a piece for the New York Times, and plans on revealing that the car accident that took her life … well, it may not have been so accidental.

Many folks might scream, curse, throw a punch or upend a table. Gene merely blinks and then asks, calmly, “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Louder than bombs, indeed.

He’s much more worried about how their two sons will handle the news, especially Conrad (Devin Druid), a teenager deeply devoted to Warcraft -type video games and uncommunicative sulking. And while the older son, Jonah ( Jesse Eisenberg ), already suspected that Mom’s passing was possibly self-inflicted, he’s not doing so well either — new fatherhood and running in to an old flame has shaken him a bit. (Sure, he can invent Facebook and get Batman and Superman to tussle, but commitment and adult responsibilities … let’s not ask the impossible here, people.) None of these three seem to have properly processed their loss over all these years. The movie may take its title from a Smiths album, but had it chosen R.E.M’s “Everybody Hurts,” no points would have been docked.

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The former national skateboarding champion of Norway — no, really — Trier has emerged as one of the most interesting filmmakers to come out the modern Scandi-cine scene, specializing in vibrant, fresh-air odes to beginnings (2006’s Reprise ) and endings (2011’s painful portrait of a suicide Oslo, August 31st ). Working on his first English-language movie with longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt, the director brings his signature storytelling flourishes into the mix, notably in a scene involving Conrad’s free-form diary entries — a montage-driven rush that invokes his mother, death, family, his computer inventory, and a giddy relationship with language as a salve.

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Given a flashback, a dream sequence or a voiceover reading in which he can go impressionistic, Trier hits paydirt; it’s the more straightforward business of making these characters feel alive or maintaining narrative momentum that seems to stifle him a bit here. He’s namechecked Ordinary People as an inspiration in interviews, and you can sense the actors aiming for that movie’s notion of denial as a detente between shutting down or emotionally breaking down. But while the lack of histrionics (with one notable classroom exception) is preferable to gross sentimentality, the chill here never satisfying freezes over or thaws, and the way peripheral plots strands are left to atrophy, especially Eisenberg’s half-baked predicament, does his fine cast no favors. Louder Than Bombs mutes the melodrama for so long that it accidentally smothers the actual drama as well. Less fuse, more detonation might have worked wonders.

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• Review: <i>Louder Than Bombs</i> Is a Subtle, Potent Family Drama

Review: Louder Than Bombs Is a Subtle, Potent Family Drama

M ost American directors wouldn’t dare make a movie about an upper-middle-class Scandinavian family and its problems. So you might ask why a filmmaker like Joachim Trier, who is Norwegian, would even try to scale an English-language drama (his first) about a well-heeled family living just outside of New York City, a group that’s been cracked apart by the lingering, seemingly insoluble effects of grief. But Louder Than Bombs, Trier’s third picture, is so emotionally forthright, and so delicately balanced, that you might just forget to ask why. It’s also rare for another reason: These days there aren’t many American filmmakers who bother to make—or are even able to make—family dramas for the big screen. “I want to kidnap the drama back from HBO and put it on the big screen,” Trier said in an interview last May. In a mainstream American movie landscape glutted with superheroes, those are practically fighting words.

Isabelle Huppert plays Isabelle, a photojournalist who has spent most of her working life in war zones. As the movie opens, she has already been dead for several years, and her husband, Gabriel Byrne’s Gene, is helping a gallery put together an exhibit of her work. Isabelle has also left behind two sons: Jesse Eisenberg’s Jonah has recently gotten a Ph.D., and he has a newborn child—he seems to be doing just fine, though later, an unspoken tentativeness about fatherhood begins to creep in. Jonah’s younger brother, Devin Druid’s Conrad, still in high school, is having a rougher time. He’s obsessed with virtual-reality gaming, he has a crush on a girl he can’t bring himself to speak to, and he believes he can work feats of magic that no one else can see. Gene worries about his younger son but can’t seem to reach him: He follows the boy and notes, with alarm, some of his weird behavior. What’s more, he has discovered that one of Isabelle’s old journalism colleagues (David Strathairn) plans to write a story about her that will include some secrets about the nature of her death, details Conrad doesn’t know.

As I’ve just laid it out, that sounds like a movie neither you nor I would probably want to see. But then, movies are often about so much more than what they’re about, and the riches of Louder Than Bombs —which borrows its name from a compilation album by The Smiths—lie in the way Trier reveals the secret fears and longings of nearly every character, showing, ultimately, that even when people fail to connect, that itself can be a kind of connection. Byrne plays Gene as a father who’s fairly vibrating with anxiety, knowing his younger son still needs his guidance and care, but flummoxed by the degree to which the boy has shut him out. Huppert’s Isabelle drifts in and out of the movie via flashback, a flesh-and-blood ghost: Jonah remembers her one way—in one flashback scene, she visits him at college, laughing and talking with his friends like a smart schoolgirl, even as she tries to hide an all-consuming anxiety. Conrad, who was only 12 when his mother died, sees her differently, remembering the time he made a dreamlike drawing of her just after she’d narrowly escaped being blasted to bits in a war zone and had come home to recuperate from her injuries—she praises the drawing, which shows her floating peacefully in the air, occupying an imaginary space between life and death. Somehow, her son has captured her recent experience simply and perfectly, and it’s proof of the unbreakable bond between them.

Louder Than Bombs, which Trier wrote with Eskil Vogt, is a story about a group of people whose feelings are all pointing in different directions, meeting one another halfway at times and zinging wildly off the mark at others. This isn’t as meticulously controlled a movie as Trier’s last, from 2011, the extraordinary Oslo, August 31st , a modernized adaptation of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s novel Le Feu Follet (also filmed by Louis Malle in 1963), which chronicles the last day in the life of a heroin addict. Though it’s a very polished piece of work in terms of its tone and subtlety of feeling, nothing in it comes together with a satisfying click.

Then again, in life, the click is elusive. In one of the movie’s most painful and beautifully wrought scenes, social oddball Conrad allows his older brother to read his journal, a freeform document that details his most private feelings about his mother as well as the number of sheets of toilet paper he typically uses and the number of times per day he masturbates. Eisenberg’s Jonah is touched by what he reads, though later, he tries to dissuade his brother from sharing the diary with his cheerleader crush, explaining that his best bet is just to “lay low” until high school and its horrors have passed. It’s terrible advice and sound advice, the kind family members give when they know they need to step in but aren’t quite sure how to help—and it also reveals something about Jonah’s own conflicted feelings about being a brother, a son, and a father.

And Huppert’s Isabelle, appearing in a flashback, has a stunning voiceover in which she describes the confusion of never feeling she’s in the “right” place, whether it’s a war zone or the home front. She talks about being away at work and aching to be home, only to have to re-familiarize herself with her loved ones every time she returns. “They can’t see how much they’ve changed,” she says, with a sense of both wonder and mourning in her voice. Louder Than Bombs ties nothing together in the end, but it leaves you with an unshakable sense of having lived with these people for a time, of being drawn in close by their worries and their joys. In their lives, as in ours, there are no real solutions, other than the sometimes seemingly impossible act of just moving forward.

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Seventh Row

A place to think deeply about movies

Alex Heeney / April 20, 2016

Review: Louder Than Bombs is a deeply empathetic look at family, grief, and memory

Joachim Trier’s sublime English-language debut,  Louder Than Bombs,  is an engrossing and empathetic look at a family recovering from trauma. Almost a year after she started singing the film’s praises at the Cannes Film Festival, here is Alex Heeney’s review of  Louder than Bombs. 

This review is the third feature to be published in our week-long celebration of Louder than Bombs . Read our Special Issue on Trier’s next film, Thelma . Read our guide to the films of Joachim Trier .

Read our two-part interview with director Joachim Trier here: part 1 and part 2 . Read our interview with cinematographer Jakob Ihre here . Read our essay on exile in  Oslo, August 31st and  Louder than Bombs here . Listen to the podcast feature Louder Than Bombs here .

J oachim Trier’ s sublime English-language debut Louder Than Bombs is an engrossing and empathetic look at a family recovering from trauma. More experimental and broader in scope than Trier’s perfectly taut Oslo, August 31st , it’s still just as carefully judged. If you dig deep enough, they share DNA : a story about exile and the meaning of home; a story about how relationships are linked to time and space; and a story of depression, loneliness, and fleeting connections.

Re-teaming with his co-writer Eskil Vogt and cinematographer Jakob Ihre ( Reprise ,  Oslo August 31st ), Trier  finds new cinematic forms to delve into the inner lives of three characters in the Reed family: the sensitive patriarch Gene (Gabriel Byrne) and his two sons — new father Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) and socially awkward teenager Conrad (Devin Druid) — who are dealing (or not) with the death of family matriarch Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert). The film switches perspectives between the three men, like a fictional version of Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell , as we try to understand what they’re going through. And like every Trier film to date, it left me completely emotionally destroyed, only increasing in potency with each repeat viewing.

Though tied together by grief for Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), the men are disconnected from one another, rarely even sharing the same frame. Yet they’re brought back together in their family home for the first time since her death three years ago thanks to a new retrospective of Isabelle’s war photography. A forthcoming New York Times article to publicize the exhibit will also reveal new information about how Isabelle died — something Conrad, who was twelve at the time, doesn’t know — which exposes old wounds.

The house itself is haunted with past memories of Isabelle’s life. Gene starts out in exile in his own home, always trespassing on Conrad’s or Jonah’s room, awkwardly standing at the back of the frame. Jonah returns to a home that is no longer his in order to run away from his new one with his new family. Yet he’s more at home in his mother’s old office than anyone else; he moves around it with ease and familiarity. Conrad is the most isolated of all, barely leaving his room where he exists in a cocoon built of headphones and his computer screen. Because the characters are isolated, closeups are pervasive in the film. The few two-shots we do get often show confrontations or disconnects, making it the loneliest frame of all.  

Between flashbacks, montages, dream sequences, documentary footage, and other forays into the minds of its characters, Louder Than Bombs is extremely densely packed. On first viewing, it may seem like an amorphous blob. But there’s an ordered chaos to its almost chapter-like structure, which borrows from the conventions of television to tell a family drama big enough for the big screen. The film starts with Jonah’s perspective, like a prologue before the title card flashes. Then the film cycles through subjective perspectives: first Gene, then Conrad, then Jonah, and back again, on repeat.

Initially, each segment is clearly demarcated by a fade to black and a sequence that gets us in their heads — a memory, a dream, a tour through the world of a video game — before the linear plot can proceed. Yet once the brothers start connecting with each other and even with their father, their perspectives start to blur . Because they’re finally all in one place, in their childhood home, they start experiencing things together. They’re linked so deeply as to almost share a mind, just as soon as they start to let each other in. The film shifts between each of the characters’ perspectives more quickly, occasionally even skipping a step: Conrad’s segment might be just a single scene of him leaving school.

In one of Jonah’s chapters, he ventures into Conrad’s room to chat. Conrad invites Jonah to read a diary entry on his computer, which we experience as Conrad’s voice narrating a glorious montage of images — a masterful short film itself. But are these the images Conrad’s words evoked for Jonah, or the images Conrad had in mind? As a prelude to one of Jonah’s chapters, there are flashbacks to scenes between Isabelle and Gene, which Jonah couldn’t have experienced. Yet we see Isabelle’s reactions that Gene misses, so they can’t quite be Gene’s memory either. Perhaps we’re seeing some version of a story Isabelle told Jonah.

Though the three men have entirely different perspectives, they all hold complementary pieces of the Isabelle puzzle. Gene’s memories are clouded by her crippling depression. Her sons’ memories of her are less angry and more longing. Jonah remembers a radiant woman who leant on him too much; he blames his father for a lot of her challenges. Conrad recalls both her embrace and seeing her from a distance, peeking through sheets hanging out to dry in the afternoon sun or catching her tearful face from behind her seat in the car. Their memories, dreams, and stories help reconstruct and resurrect Isabelle, each with only a partial, imperfect, yet overlapping part of her story.

When we finally do get Isabelle’s narration of her point of view, it’s also a composite of perspectives. That’s how she exists in the present: as a fragmented memory. Isabelle lived two separate lives: one overseas at war and one at home. She was always longing for where she wasn’t, unable to connect entirely to where she was. Isabelle’s colleague and overseas lover Richard (David Strathairn) claims she wanted to make things work with Gene, which is why their affair never continued stateside; Gene says he never believed that. They’re both probably right, each told half-truths by the woman they loved.

Although the protagonists are all men, none of them conform to conventional gender roles. Gene gave up his career to cook and care for the boys while Isabelle went on dangerous adventures. Byrne portrays a sensitive man desperately trying to show his love but unsure of how. Jonah, the sociologist professor, fancies himself detached and rational, but he’s the least self-aware of all: he spends the film running away from his wife and newborn, chasing after the ghost of his mother. Eisenberg’s whispery line deliveries suggest a man forced to keep secrets but quietly seething. Yet he’s also gentle and sensitive. Conrad may appear introverted and laconic, but he longs for a deeper connection; newcomer Devin Druid imbues all his scenes with great feeling and sadness.

Each of the men cope with their grief through romantic relationships, which are both intrinsically about Isabelle and about a new stage in their lives. But the women aren’t mere props: we always understand their perspectives, and why their relationships with the Reed men are meaningful. Jonah temporarily rekindles a romance with an old flame, Erin (Rachel Brosnahan), who knew his mother and is dealing with her own mother’s recent death. Their fleeting connection is about time travel: sex offers them the intimacy and openness they need. Just like Isabelle’s affair with Richard, their connection makes sense only in this moment in their old stomping ground:The spell breaks for both of them at the same time. Brosnahan remarkably creates a whole history for both her character and her relationship to Jonah that makes you feel you’ve known her longer.

Because Louder Than Bombs is a film about grief, it may on the surface seem bleak. Old wounds never fully heal and catharsis comes in small drops, not big dramatic moments. But it’s a film about people who love each other even if they’re angry, people who are trying even if their efforts are fruitless. The closing shot is the first time we see all three men in one space together and in a single frame, headed into the future. It’s the polar opposite of a drug addict alone in his childhood bedroom, shooting up for one last time. Where the protagonist of Oslo, August 31st saw only despair, the Reed family has forward motion.

Read our two-part interview with director and co-writer Joachim Trier here.

Read our interview with  cinematographer Jakob Ihre here .

Read our essay on  exile in  Oslo, August 31st  and  Louder than Bombs  here .

Listen to the podcast on Louder Than Bombs, Stories We Tell, and Mouthpiece here.

About Alex Heeney

Alex is the Editor-in-Chief of The Seventh Row, based in San Francisco and from Toronto, Canada.

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Louder Than Bombs Review

22 Apr 2016

Louder Than Bombs

Clearly, Norwegian film directors have a thing about French photojournalists experiencing domestic crises, as Joachim Trier's English-language debut has much in common with Erik Poppe's A Thousand Times Good Night (2013). Despite only appearing fleetingly in flashback, however, Isabelle Huppert gives a much more controlled performance than Juliette Binoche managed. But this is a far more thoughtful study of the impact that reporting from war zones can have on correspondents and the loved ones left behind dreading the sound of the telephone. Yet, Trier and co-scenarist Eskil Vogt also consider the strain placed upon risk-takers needing normality after enduring discomfort and danger who return home to find that life has cheerfully continued in their absence.

It's a thoughtful study of the impact that reporting from war zones can have on correspondents and the loved ones left behind.

Estranged by their repressed grief, Gabriel Byrne and sons Jesse Eisenberg and Devin Druid have struggled to cope. Eisenberg has just become a father, yet he strays into an affair with an old flame when he comes back to sort through Huppert's effects for a gallery exhibition. Byrne also finds unsatisfactory solace with colleague Amy Ryan, who teaches the English lessons Druid spends daydreaming of classmate Ruby Jerins. The sequence in which Druid relates the words Jerins is reading aloud from a book to his feelings for her and Huppert is deftly done, as are the montage accompanying Eisenberg's perusal of his brother's stream-of-consciousness journal and Strathairn and Huppert's intercut reflection on their profession. But this always feels more literary than Trier's more innovatively cinematic outings, Reprise (2006) and Oslo, August 31st (2011).

The performances are admirable, with Druid's alienated taciturnity mirroring Huppert's despairing stillness. Yet, while it's never mawkish, this considered study of mourning, memory and moving on rarely delves beneath the meticulously delineated surface.

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Movies | 27 07 2016

Film Review: ‘Louder Than Bombs’

A family copes with the loss of their mother in Scandi talent Joachim Trier's first English-language feature.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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In the 35 years since “Ordinary People,” American cinema has told and retold stories of how a death in the family can reveal the dysfunction no one wanted to admit was there. “ Louder Than Bombs ” is just such a picture, studying how a widower and his two sons cope with learning the “circumstances” of the accident that killed his war-photographer wife, but it also manages to be the opposite of nearly every other film in the genre. Directed by Joachim Trier , who’s certainly gifted enough to have turned in a passive-viewing tearjerker, “Bombs” asks audiences to bring their brains, eschewing grand catharsis in favor of subtle psychological nuance, resulting in a film that runs both slender and cold on the surface, but rewards the arthouse audiences willing to give it a deeper reading.

Ever since Trier’s 2006 feature debut, “Reprise” (which landed him on Variety ’s “10 Directors to Watch” list), Hollywood has been courting the Norwegian helmer with offers to come and make a film in the States. Switching to English is no trouble for Trier, who studied at the U.K.’s National Film & Television School, although there remains something far more alien about the cinematic syntax and language he uses to express his ideas.

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Strangely, “Louder Than Bombs” manages to be glaringly obvious and admirably subtle in the same breath. Consider the title, which, apart from being a reference to the Smiths’ classic compilation album, feels like false advertising for such a quiet film, which is carried along by Ola Flottum’s low, trancelike score, yet is set so far away from the front lines where Isabelle Reed ( Isabelle Huppert ) is out trying to change the world. Your average picture may say a thousand words, but one of Reed’s, snapped in hot zones around the world and routinely landing on page one of the New York Times, is potentially powerful enough to have an almost nuclear effect.

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Obviously, such a career can ruin a person, too, making it impossible to readjust to a society that’s not only too calm, but too far removed from the action to raise awareness, creating a domino effect where post-traumatic stress is concerned. Huppert barely appears in the film, haunting the edges like some sort of ghost, viewed slightly differently by everyone who remembered her — precisely the sort of formally intriguing challenge at which Trier excels, considering the way he shuffles chronology and perspective.

For Times colleague Richard Weissman (David Strathairn), Isabelle represents a fallen hero whose memory he seeks to honor by writing an in-depth column timed to coincide with a posthumous retrospective of her work — a story in which he intends to reveal that Isabelle’s death was almost certainly a suicide. For Isabelle’s husband, Gene (Gabriel Byrne), that deadline means having to re-examine his feelings toward his wife, as well as breaking the news to his sulky teenage son, Conrad (played by “Olive Kitteridge’s” promising Devin Druid). Meanwhile, older sibling Jonah ( Jesse Eisenberg , once again typecast as the neurotic academic) seems more well adjusted at first, having just fathered an infant son, though he clearly has no shortage of issues to work through as well.

Frankly, the sight of these characters coping with Isabelle’s death isn’t nearly as rich or ambitious as another parallel theme that Trier and writing partner Eskil Vogt have opted to explore with the project: the issue of artistic ambition and how committing to a creative career (or abandoning it, as the case may be) shapes our lives and the relationships we maintain with loved ones. Isabelle put her work before her family, presumably using its political importance to justify the addiction she felt to the front lines. Gene, on the other hand, started his career as an actor, but put that aside at a certain point in order to focus on his wife and children, ultimately taking a non-glamorous job teaching at the local high school (where he’s struck up a covert affair with Conrad’s teacher, played by Amy Ryan).

Both of Trier’s previous features, “Reprise” and the suicide-centered “Oslo, August 31st,” concern themselves with tortured intellectuals who question their own existence, vacillating between whatever force drives them to create and the equally compelling impulse to self-destruct. Early on, the film identifies most strongly with Gene, but in time, it shifts to each of his sons before finally settling on Conrad. When we meet the kid, he seems awkward and angry, although in time, by replaying a series of events through the character’s perspective rather than his father’s, we see that he, too, has artistic talent, as a writer — a career for which Trier himself sometimes seems more suited. After all, behind the pic’s highly technical framing is a literary-minded helmer who appears to view screenwriting as an extension of the Nouveau Roman (or “new novel”) tradition, constantly bending the rules and toying with such elements as narrative continuity, structure and form in bold but always elegant ways.

In Trier’s hands, storytelling becomes a political act — not the sort that sees Isabelle’s reasons for repeatedly putting herself in harm’s way as being worthier than whatever domestic satisfaction she might take from staying home, but rather the kind that challenges the accepted modes of cinematic expression. One clue (falling on the more obvious side of things) presents itself when Conrad relays a lesson learned from his mother, who taught him how changing the framing of a photograph can completely change its meaning — which invites us to reflect on what Trier has cropped out of his own story, a contempo spin on James Agee’s “A Death in the Family,” complete with multiple re-enactments of the fatal crash and a dizzyingly modern found-footage montage.

As conceived, “Louder Than Bombs” remains a melodrama, but a curiously non-explosive one. The fuses appear to be burning on the inside here, as Trier focuses on the surviving Reeds’ almost tragic inability to connect. Conrad shuts down Gene’s every attempt at father-son communication, including a desperate workaround Gene attempts, going undercover in his son’s favorite role-playing game. At first, Johan has more encouraging words for Conrad, but then, in a horrifying conversation on the school bleachers, we realize just how scarred and cynical his older brother is. It’s as if all the trauma Isabelle took upon herself were passed on to her family, the battle scars she wears with pride internalized by those who spent every day afraid she might die in the field.

Those looking for a sexy in-the-trenches thriller would do better to track down “1,000 Times Good Night,” in which Michael Haneke’s other muse, Juliette Binoche, also plays a war photographer. Here, it hardly matters that Isabelle worked as a front-line shutterbug. That’s one of the few concrete details in a film that lacks much of the specificity that made Trier’s two previous films so fascinating — and the photos he attributes to her so arresting.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (competing), May 17, 2015. Running time: 109 MIN.

• Production: (Norway-France-Denmark) A Motlys, Memento Films presentation of a Motlys, Memento Films Prod., Nimbus Film production, in association with Animal Kingdom, Beachside Films, Memento Filmsinternational, Memento Films Distribution, Bona Fide Prods., in co-production with Arte France Cinema, Don't Look Now. (International sales: Memento Films Intl., Paris.) Produced by Thomas Robsahm, Joshua Astrachan, Albert Berger, Ron Yerxa, Marc Turtletaub, Alexandre Mallet-Guy. Executive producers, Sigve, Endresen, Frederick W. Green, Michael B. Clark, Emilie Georges, Nicholas Shumaker, Naima Abed, Joachim Trier, Eskil Vogt. Co-producers, Bo Ehrhardt, Mikkel Jersin.
• Crew: Directed by Joachim Trier. Screenplay, Eskil Vogt, Trier. Camera (color), Jakob Ihre; editor, Olivier Bugge Coutte; music, Ola Flottum; production designer, Molly Hughes; costume designer, Emma Potter; sound designer, Gisle Tveito; line producer, Kathryn Dean; casting, Laura Rosenthal.
• With: Gabriel Byrne, Isabelle Huppert, Jesse Eisenberg, Devin Druid, Rachel Brosnahan, Ruby Jerins, Megan Ketch, David Strathairn, Amy Ryan.

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Louder Than Bombs – Review

As with his previous film,  Oslo, August 31st , Joachim Trier’s finest directing moments in  Louder Than Bombs  come with voiceovers and memories, plus one excellent extended party sequence.

For his English language debut, the director assembles a strong cast including a soulful Gabriel Byrne – officially deserving a comeback – and the young Devin Druid, bringing an intelligent subtlety that makes his later scenes all the sweeter.

Trier’s innate feeling for the complexities of personality and memory invests this complex tapestry with moving depths and satisfyingly frustrating blocks: each character individually unknowable, fine drama emerges in their attempts to understand one another.

The unhappiness occasionally descends into old clichés of difficult people being difficult – but it’s that rare middle-class crisis so fascinatingly conceived, shot and edited that you’ll forgive it anything.

RATING: 4/5

INFORMATION

CAST: Gabriel Byrne, Jesse Eisenberg, Isabelle Huppert, Devin Druid, Amy Ryan, David Strathairn, Rachel Brosnahan 

DIRECTOR: Joachim Trier

WRITERS: Joachim Trier & Eskil Vogt

SYNOPSIS: Three years after her untimely death, a conflict photographer’s (Huppert) work is to be given a major retrospective. Eldest son Jonah (Eisenberg) is brought back to the family home where he tries to reconnect with his father (Byrne) and his increasingly withdrawn younger brother (Druid), forcing each to delve deep into their memories and problems. 

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Director Joachim Trier Imbues Louder Than Bombs With Uncommon Depth

The current fashion in movies is for long takes (or, in the case of Alejandro Iñárritu, faked long takes) and a camera that quivers and swerves alongside the characters, which can be extremely potent but limits films to real time and real space. The Norwegian director Joachim Trier has always been more of a montage guy. In his mournful, probing drama Louder Than Bombs , he uses flurries of images (along with first-person narration) to capture peoples’ teeming inner spaces. Point-of-view is passed like a baton among the tortured main characters — a father (Gabriel Byrne), two sons ( Jesse Eisenberg and Devin Druid), and a mother (Isabelle Huppert) who’s dead before the action proper starts but who comes to life (and has her own inner space) in flashbacks. Swept along by this flood of memories, dreams, and fantasies, you might feel as if everyone onscreen is the protagonist of his or her own novel.

The Norwegian director (along with his co-screenwriter, Eskil Vogt) came on the scene with a 2006 film called Reprise . A jumpy, hyper-literate comedy with ironic narration about two pals who submit their novels to a publisher at the same time, it’s like Speed Racer for the bohemian intelligentsia — you come out humming the syntax. Five years later, he made the stunning Oslo, August 31 , the second adaptation (after Louis Malle) of the novel The Fire Within , which chronicles the last day in the life of unstable young man: Trier takes you so far into his protagonist’s head that when it ends you might think you need to go into rehab. These are not avant-garde films — they’re extremely accessible. But they have an original and disarming language. Even Louder Than Bombs , Trier’s first English-language film and arguably his most conventional, has its own unique vocabulary.

Its structure is also peculiar. Louder Than Bombs opens in a hospital, where the wife of Jonah (Eisenberg) has just had a baby and Jonah bumps into an old girlfriend (a jumpy, winsome Rachel Brosnahan). In the course of their encounter, Eisenberg does a double take that’s so funny it might be the start of a good sex farce. But then Trier moves — with no transition — into a TV obituary for Jonah’s mother, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a war photographer who died not in Afghanistan but in a car crash near the family home in Nyack, New York. Early on we learn what wasn’t made public: that this was a suicide. Isabelle’s husband, Gene (Byrne), knows that, of course, and so does Jonah. But the news was held back from the troubled younger son, Conrad (Druid), who’s now in high school. He’ll find out soon, though. There’s going to be a retrospective of Isabelle’s work, and a colleague of hers (David Strathairn) plans to tell the truth in a New York Times essay.

Louder Than Bombs is fueled by the imminence of that revelation, but it’s always backing up, leaping forward, and spinning off into tangents. In truth, I’m not sure the movie jells — even the title, from an album by The Smiths, seems oblique. But I loved it anyway. Trier wants to pack as much as he can into every last second using every tool in his cinematic arsenal, and the way he flows from perspective to perspective has a musical integrity. In one elaborate sequence, the anxious Gene (a high-school teacher) follows his glum, uncommunicative Conrad from an English class to a playground to a restaurant to the cemetery where Isabelle is buried. Then we see the sequence from Conrad’s vantage. In that class, a girl (Ruby Jerins) with whom he’s infatuated begins to read aloud from a novel — when it suddenly hits us that the words she’s reading have been transformed in Conrad’s mind into the story of his mother and her fatal crash, which he imagines in two alternate versions, complete with flying glass and a somersaulting car.

The material world is always subordinate to the characters’ thoughts and emotions, even those of Isabelle. We’re there in her dream of making love while her husband watches, indifferently, from a nearby car. She tells us that, home from the war, she feels not unwanted or unloved but unneeded, extraneous. It’s as if Trier is saying, “Photographs show much, but in a film we can go so far beyond the surface.” Conrad waves his hands and flutters, from afar, the hair of the girl he loves. His mother stares into the camera, just stares, as if she’s reaching from beyond the grave — or is this her point-of-view from the other side?

Some of the story lines aren’t filled in, especially Jonah’s alienation from his wife (Megan Ketch) and child. And there isn’t enough — there’s rarely enough these days — of Amy Ryan, who plays Conrad’s English teacher and Gene’s lover. But Trier makes you feel intimate with these people. Eisenberg turns Jonah’s prickly avoidance — which could be so hateful — into a source of poignancy: Jonah has strong opinions, none of which cohere. Druid’s mixture of sullen and yearning helps you see beyond his scowls. (The actor is best known as the younger incarnation of the title character’s son in Olive Kittredge .) Byrne’s ineffectual attempts to reach out make him seem a ghost in his own life — almost as ghostly as Huppert’s Isabelle.

As I wait with excitement to see Byrne’s James Tyrone Sr. in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (along with Jessica Lange, Michael Shannon, and John Gallagher Jr., who played the older incarnation of Olive Kittredge’s son), I can’t help thinking vis-à-vis Louder Than Bombs of Eugene O’Neill’s famous line from the play, “Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.” Trier isn’t the poet that O’Neill is, but as a filmmaker, he takes you inside the fog and brings those stammers to life.

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Review: louder than bombs.

Joachim Trier’s film is a parable that takes depression seriously as a condition and a state of being.

Befitting a title that evokes both the horrors of war and a Smiths compilation album, Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs endeavors to tap into two distinct varieties of suffering, with immediate deadly peril and corrosive slow-burn angst drawn into an unusual, often unsteady association with one another. Attempting a survey of the ways in which large-scale political events inspire and influence the micro-geography of personal depression, the Norwegian director’s American debut digs into the melancholy of privilege, as crimes perpetrated in faraway lands reverberate back to disrupt the comforts of home, from the scrub plains of Syria to Nyack’s carefully manicured lawns.

That connection is made through the conduit of Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert), an esteemed war photographer who, after finally forcing herself to retire from her dangerous but addictive profession, died tragically in a mysterious car accident that seems to have been ruled a suicide. Primarily set four years after this event, the film charts the slow recovery of the splintered family she’s left behind, setting the stage for a deliberately paced ensemble drama that’s both heavily redolent of cliché and somehow separate from it, steadying itself through an acute focus on the idiosyncrasies of human behavior and an expansive, patient empathy for its flawed characters.

Key to this balance is an enduring sense of ambiguity, stemming from the fact that, despite its status as the emotional and narrative center of the film, the exact nature of Isabelle’s death is never clarified. Possible scenarios are glimpsed via the daydreams of one character, and discussed obliquely by others, but precise explanations are avoided. This mystery is treated with trepidation as the family’s older son, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), fleeing from the pressures of fatherhood after his wife gives birth to their first child, arrives home to sift through Isabelle’s photo archives. Here he intrudes upon the brewing cold war between his troubled teenaged brother, Conrad (Devin Druid), and exhausted father, Gene (Gabriel Byrne), neither of whom has found a tenable method for living together without Isabelle, the emptiness of their too-large house creating ample space for bouts of lonesome brooding.

In telling this tale, Trier, aided by frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, indulges in many of the hacky excesses of high-toned indie drama, while making enough small subversions of the format to leave things feeling slightly askew. Beyond a commitment to over-determined symbolic imagery, further indicators of a prosaic visual approach include the ever-present but always subtle shaky cam, fluttering ever so lightly to underline the characters’ tremulous emotional instability, and the familiar outlines of this sad suburban milieu, in which seemingly perfect lives are revealed as rotten at the core.

What makes the film more interesting than the usual and formulaically structured hyperlink drama is its commitment to mounting inquiries rather than offering pat solutions. Refusing to approach this tangle of misery as a puzzle to be solved, the film keeps searching further, digging up further complications and issues, opening up the story instead of closing it off.

Like Trier’s previous Oslo, August 31 , Louder Than Bombs is a parable that takes depression seriously as a condition and a state of being, not merely a convenient impetus for dramatic catharsis. The characters here start out as stock figures, but deepen via the intensive exploration of their individual problems. They behave logically and illogically in quick succession, the rashness of self-destructive hatred bundled inextricably with their capacity and need for love, with the film attempting to explicate some small sense of deeper meaning out of their painful circumstances.

At one point, Isabelle describes the personal toll of heading off to war, even as an observer, and the heavy weight of being responsible for communicating on behalf of its victims. Along with that burden comes the sensation of dividing oneself into distinct domestic and professional selves, only to discover that each of those versions yearns for the comforts reserved for the other. As with a few other select instances of emotional revelation here, this speech takes on the form of a poetic off-screen narration delivered in two alternating voices, making it unclear if it’s being dramatically attributed to one or two characters. In this case, the words seemingly belong both to Reed and her colleague, Richard (David Straitharn), whose looming New York Times profile on Isabelle, which promises to reveal the supposed truth about her demise, provides the story with its primary impetus.

Richard’s status as Isabelle’s professional partner, and a later revelation of deeper connections between the two, helps develop the sensation of ghostly mirroring that expands as the film progresses. Rather than climactic fireworks, Gene’s eventual confrontation with his de facto double yields only the image of two broken men, damaged in entirely different ways by their relationship to this tragedy. Just as Isabelle’s proximity to unvarnished human agony in countless different locations both catalyzed and complicated her own feelings of dislocation and ennui, the characters here repeatedly find themselves matched up against others whose suffering simultaneously parallels and makes a mockery of their own. Incapable of drawing anything instructive from these meetings, they continue stumbling on alone, shaded from realization by the myopic insularity of their own clandestine suffering.

This links up with the film’s other major metaphorical conceit, again expressed via significant words from Isabelle, this time on how any image can be radically transformed by simply excising part of the picture and modifying its framing. This is a technique Trier himself tries out a few times, both in sly trick compositions and the larger story of a family recontexualized by the removal of one of its members. The confluence of these two motifs helps clarify the dual focus on concepts of emotional expansion and reduction, as well as its subtle subversion of a familiar wartime domestic narrative, confirming Louder Than Bombs as a film far more invested in penetrating dramatic analysis than might initially appear.

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Two brothers and their father struggle to communicate while coping with new details about their mother and wife on the three year anniversary of her death.

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Louder than a bomb.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 1 Review
• Kids Say 0 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Teens perform poetry in inspiring docu; some cursing.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Louder than a Bomb is the name of the country's biggest team poetry slam, a spoken poetry competition in Chicago for high school teams. The documentary, part of Oprah Winfrey's OWN network productions, follows four promising teams as they prepare for and compete in the eighth annual…

Why Age 14+?

"F--k," "s--t," "goddamn," "a--hole," "f-ggot," "d--k," "bush," and "bastard."

Domestic abuse, drug and alcohol abuse are mentioned. A girl recalls serving her

Drug and alcohol abuse are described.

Any Positive Content?

Nate is a senior with a passion and talent for poetry who wants to be a professo

If you trust someone, they become trustworthy. Dedicated teachers work to instil

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Domestic abuse, drug and alcohol abuse are mentioned. A girl recalls serving her father alcohol when she was 8 years old.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Role Models

Nate is a senior with a passion and talent for poetry who wants to be a professor and a rap singer. Mr. Sloan cares passionately about his students, nurturing their talents and emphasizing the importance of being good people. Nova has lovingly cared for her brother who has autism since he was a baby.

Positive Messages

If you trust someone, they become trustworthy. Dedicated teachers work to instill confidence in talented students. Many people just need a little encouragement to produce good work. Leave your heart on the stage.

Parents need to know that Louder than a Bomb is the name of the country's biggest team poetry slam, a spoken poetry competition in Chicago for high school teams. The documentary, part of Oprah Winfrey's OWN network productions, follows four promising teams as they prepare for and compete in the eighth annual competition in 2008. An inner-city Chicago school had won it the previous year, its first year competing, in a major upset. Their coach struggles to help the teammates believe in themselves, which he considers far more important than winning the competition. The movie conveys the dedication of the coaches and the determination and passion of the talented competitors as they work hard and support each other. Language includes "f--k" and "s--t," and several poems depict illness, shootings, racial prejudice, and other challenges facing urban youth. Just as important are the vocabulary words and widespread literary and historical references the young poets include in their poems. The movie is bursting with role models and inspiration. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (1)

Based on 1 parent review

Amazing and inspiring

What's the story.

LOUDER THAN A BOMB is a look at four of the teams and soloists from 60 schools that compete in the spoken poetry slam (competition) of the same name, the largest teen slam in the country. Steinmetz, an inner-city school, won the previous year as first-time competitors, and they return hoping for nothing less than a repeat triumph. Kevin, Jesus, Lamar, and the rest feel they didn't receive the respect they deserved the year before, and they understand they're up against other talented and equally motivated writers and performers. There's Nate, a dynamic and thoughtful senior from Whitney Young High School, who has been performing poetry since he was a little kid; Adam, a buoyant cheerleader of a talent from Northside Prep, appreciative of the chance to meet so many gifted competitors, and Nova from Oak Park, whose poetry once focused on her alcoholic, abusive father and now celebrates caring for her younger autistic brother. They all pour their hearts and insights into moving poems that they perform with the verve, energy, and grace of practiced dancers. The filmmakers were given access to moments at home and at school. We are flies on the wall as a dedicated coach threatens expulsion for team members who are failing to pull their weight. We watch as teams make dramatic last-minute program changes because of scoring imbalances. The filmmakers present many moving and spectacular performances without too much emphasis on winning or losing, in recognition of the fact that every student who competes in Louder than a Bomb seems to be a winner just for participating.

Is It Any Good?

If the word is mightier than the sword, nothing proves that premise more emphatically than this poetry slam and this moving record of its impact on the youth who support it. Directors Jon Siskel (nephew of the TV film critic) and Greg Jacobs have chosen their focus wisely, featuring Nate, a senior suffering pangs over performing in his last slam before he moves on to college. He's an artist whose rap-like poetry references Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, iambic pentameter, and Allen Ginsburg. He says that his ego is "Langston Huge." To watch him write, perform, teach, and inspire the younger members of his school's team is to see the transformation of a talented young man maturing into a caring, nurturing adult. Adam is a whirling power-plant of joy and dedication who understands and is grateful for the privilege of his suburban upbringing and also appreciative of the opportunity to meet and befriend talented, driven peers he would never have met without the poetry slam. His supportive dad jokes, "There's a tremendous job market for slam poetry," then says he's happy to see Adam "get educated, get a passion. He'll figure out how to make a living later." The fact that Adam has such support and stability, both emotional and financial, sets him apart from many of the other participants, whose poetry describes shootings and domestic abuse. Others write about mass shootings and gun control.

The Louder than a Bomb filmmakers matter-of-factly present racial bias. The Steinmetz team members say they were looked down on their first year as "guys with hoodies who didn't belong." And their coach laments that he deeply believes in his kids but that he has to fight to persuade them not to succumb to predictions by those who think they'll never amount to anything. Even the slam's founders want to take the emphasis off of winning, decrying the scoring system that allows a winner to be named for overshadowing the supreme importance of the poetry. The second-placers find the wisdom to recognize that they may have gotten more out of coming in second than they would have gotten out of winning. The movie ends on that triumphant realization and a list of colleges some of the participants later attended.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the importance of believing in yourself. High school students from inner-city schools get little positive feedback from the world about their potential to do great things. What are some of the ways Coach Sloan encourages his team to do well and to be responsible in Louder than a Bomb ?

When Coach Sloan threatens to cut team members who have been disrespectful and irresponsible, why do you think he changes his mind? What do those team members do to persuade him to give them another chance?

Although the slam is a contest, the atmosphere created by the competitors themselves seemed supportive and encouraging among rivals. How do you think they achieved that atmosphere? Do you think conflict in other areas of life could be defused if people showed each other similar respect?

Movie Details

• In theaters : July 30, 2010
• On DVD or streaming : March 20, 2012
• Directors : Greg Jacobs , Jon SIskel
• Studio : Virgil Films and Entertainment
• Genre : Documentary
• Character Strengths : Communication , Perseverance , Teamwork
• Run time : 100 minutes
• MPAA rating : NR
• Last updated : May 13, 2024

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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

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Louder Than Bombs (2015)

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