Director: Marc Meyers
Year Released: 2017
Rating: 3.0
Adaptation of John Backderf's graphic novel (based on his own life) about going to high school with the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer (Ross Lynch) and becoming sort-of pals - Derf and his mates would encourage ol' Jeff to pretend to have seizures and fits in public (to their own amusement) before Dahmer, fascinated with dumping road kill in acid, would turn his grotesque attention to human subjects. While there is zero excuse for the crimes Jeffrey would end up committing, this at least tries to show the events leading up to them: the drinking, the grotesque invasive thoughts, the homosexual guilt, his parents' divorce, his mother's mental illness (granted, many people go through worse and never become cannibals). It hints that Derf harbors lingering guilt over the way he treated Dahmer as a sideshow freak, although he tries to brush it away as Teens Just Being Teens ... and it never truly gets into Dahmer's head (aside from some agonized acting by Lynch), although that's probably an impossible task (Skinner did call the mind a 'black box'). The scene with Walter Mondale (then V.P. for Jimmy Carter), has to be one of the wildest meet-ups of all time, not too far off from Nixon and Elvis Presley.
