There is something distinctly dystopian about Our Hero, Balthazar, though its world is entirely recognizable. Teenagers rehearse school shootings, loneliness becomes an online identity, and artificial intelligence makes it possible to impersonate someone else's voice. In Oscar Boyson's feature directorial debut, the absurdities of contemporary American life have become so commonplace that they hardly require exaggeration. The film's bleakest suggestion is that this might simply be what growing up looks like now.
Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) is a wealthy Manhattan teenager who records himself crying about gun violence, less out of genuine conviction than in the hope of impressing a politically engaged classmate. When an anonymous online commenter appears to threaten a school shooting, Balthazar sees an opportunity to turn his performative activism into something resembling heroism. He eventually travels to Texas to confront Solomon (Asa Butterfield), a socially isolated young man whose online persona is built around resentment, provocation, and the possibility of violence.
The premise is ridiculous, though Boyson is careful to establish a world in which such behavior feels plausible. Balthazar's social conscience is largely an exercise in self-presentation. His tears arrive on command, his political commitments are conveniently aligned with his romantic ambitions, and his understanding of other people rarely extends beyond what they might offer him. Even his attempts at intimacy are mediated through technology. In one of the film's more unsettling jokes, he uses AI voice cloning to impersonate a woman while communicating with Solomon. It is funny in its absurdity, but also revealing: these are young men who find it easier to manufacture a relationship than to risk an authentic one.
Butterfield, meanwhile, delivers the film's most surprising performance. Having built much of his career playing sensitive, awkward young men, he is almost unrecognizable as Solomon. His physicality, voice, and mannerisms suggest someone who has constructed an entire personality from the darker corners of the internet. Solomon's negativity has become its own kind of charisma, a defensive posture that allows him to project confidence while revealing just how little he possesses. Butterfield makes him simultaneously unpleasant, ridiculous, and strangely sympathetic.
The film becomes most interesting when Balthazar and Solomon finally meet. Their relationship develops into a perverse coming-of-age story, with guns, drugs, and cars serving as the familiar accessories of adolescent freedom. These are the objects through which generations of American boys have imagined themselves becoming men, though here the rituals feel emptied of their original meaning. The gun offers an illusion of power, the car an illusion of independence, and their growing friendship an illusion of mutual understanding. Neither boy seems particularly capable of distinguishing the performance of masculinity from the real thing.
Boyson, who previously worked as a producer with the Safdie brothers, brings a similar interest in uncomfortable behavior and characters operating well beyond their emotional capabilities. There is an appealing unpredictability to the film, which moves between satire, buddy comedy, and something considerably darker. Its humor often comes from the uncomfortable recognition that the characters' most absurd impulses are not entirely unfamiliar.
Still, Our Hero, Balthazar occasionally suffers from the breadth of its ambitions. Gun violence, performative activism, incel culture, class inequality, online radicalization, artificial intelligence, and the commercialization of self-improvement all compete for attention. Some observations are sharper than others, and the film can feel more interested in identifying the contradictions of contemporary America than in exploring any one of them in depth. Its provocations are frequently effective, but provocation alone is not always enough.
What stays with me is less the film's social commentary than the sadness beneath its comedy. Balthazar and Solomon come from opposite ends of American life, yet both have absorbed the same lesson: attention is a substitute for affection, and identity is something to be assembled from whatever the culture makes available. For all their differences, neither knows how to be himself without an audience.
Our Hero, Balthazar is uneven, occasionally overstated, and often very funny. Its dystopia is not one in which technology has replaced human connection entirely, but one in which a generation has grown up struggling to recognize the difference. The tragedy is that these boys are desperate to become somebody without quite knowing who they already are.
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