Our Hero,
Balthazar

Nice idea. Too long. That is most of what I have to say about Our Hero, Balthazar, and I mean both of those things genuinely. The idea is original, daring, and very much of this specific moment in time. The execution stretches it past the point where it needed to stop.

Balthazar, or Balthy, is a wealthy Manhattan teenager with an absent father, a distracted mother, and a social media presence built entirely on fake emotion. He films himself crying about gun control for clicks and to impress his activist crush. During one of his streams, a stranger messages him privately and claims to be planning a school shooting. Instead of calling the police, Balthy flies to Texas alone to stop it himself. In Texas he meets Solomon, the stranger, who turns out to be less of a threat than advertised and more of a sad, broke metalhead living in a trailer with his grandmother.

That setup is genuinely interesting. A rich performative activist and a lonely rural kid who posts edgy things online end up spending real time together and the film uses that collision to say something about class, attention, loneliness, and the gap between online identity and actual humanity. These are real things worth saying.

The Idea

Oscar Boyson, who produced Uncut Gems before making this his directing debut, understands the internet-native film. He knows how people perform for cameras when the cameras are their own phones. He knows how loneliness looks when it is filtered through a screen. Balthy faking grief for viral engagement, then being genuinely confused by an actual human being who does not perform at all, is a sharp observation and the film builds something real out of it.

Jaeden Martell plays Balthy as deliberately off-putting and intentionally difficult to like, which is exactly right. Asa Butterfield as Solomon is the more interesting performance. He gives the character a specific kind of bleak warmth that makes every scene between the two of them work better than it has any right to.

Too Long

At 96 minutes, Our Hero, Balthazar is not a long film on paper. But it feels longer than it is. The middle section, once Balthy and Solomon are together in Texas, finds a rhythm and then loses it. The film keeps adding new complications and subplots when what it needed was to tighten what it already had. A pyramid scheme subplot involving Solomon's father. A thread about Balthy's mother that goes nowhere meaningful. A third act that does not know when it has made its point.

The film has genuine ambition and some of that ambition pays off. But ambition and discipline need to coexist and here the discipline is missing. The result is a film that could have been a very tight 75 minutes and instead runs out of momentum before it reaches the end.

Worth Watching Anyway

Despite all of that, Our Hero, Balthazar is still worth watching. The 94% on Rotten Tomatoes reflects a genuine critical enthusiasm for its audacity and the quality of its best scenes. My 2.5 reflects the frustration of watching something with a great idea that cannot quite hold itself together for the full running time. Both of those things can be true.