Rocket Science (2007) on Netflix
Hal Hefner stutters, and his father has just walked out on the family in Plainsboro, New Jersey. When debate team star Ginny Ryerson asks him to be her debate partner, he agrees.
- Netflix2.9/5
- IMDb6.5/1014,071 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes84%
Trailer
Plot summary
Hal Hefner is a fifteen-year-old in Plainsboro, New Jersey who stutters. His older brother Earl is both obsessive-compulsive and a kleptomaniac, his father Doyle has walked out on the family, and his mother Juliet is seeing the father of Heston, a friend from school. One day on the school bus, Ginny Ryerson, the star of the debate team, urges Hal to replace her former partner Ben Wekselbaum, who left school after he fell silent in the middle of a speech. Hal refuses, then agrees. He and Ginny study for the coming tournament, preparing arguments for and against federal support for teaching abstinence in public schools. During a practice debate Hal cannot speak, and he runs out of the room.
Cast
- Virginia Houseas English Teacher (as Virginia Frank)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Rocket Science (2007)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Carter Jenkins was at one point set to play Hal, but NBC blocked it as he was contracted for further episodes of Surface; after six months of searching, HBO Films said it would abandon the project unless a lead was found in two weeks, and a desperate Jeffrey Blitz then found Thompson's tape among unsolicited audition tapes.
- In the film Hal cannot say the word “pizza”, drawn from Blitz's failure to order a hamburger; Hal's first debate is based on Blitz's own, where for eight minutes he could only make the sound “agh”, and Hal throwing a cello through a window came from Blitz destroying a flute.
- Despite claiming to be “allergic” to autobiographical films, the writer was persuaded by HBO executive Maud Nadler to base the screenplay on his own adolescence, after telling her that as a teenager he joined his school's debate team to try and overcome his stutter.
- Jonah Hill had auditioned for another role but was unavailable, shooting another film at the same time; Blitz was keen to have him appear and wrote him a small role as the Junior Philosopher, a teenager Hal meets in the library, appearing in only two scenes.
- Blitz chose to film in Maryland because its child labor laws are much less restrictive than those of New Jersey, where the film is set, which mattered because Reece Thompson, sixteen years old at the time, appears in almost every scene.
