Plot summary, by Lilith
NOT a review, and MAJOR SPOILERS ahead
Photos, with one exception, are NOT from the movie.
Photo of Aaron Pearl is my own, from the premiere
Thumbnails can be clicked on to view larger image

The first image we see is of a large trunk being drug (by a rope over his shoulder) down what we presume is a street, by what appears to be a boy. We realize almost immediately, even before the shot pans up far enough to show us his face, that this must be Elijah Wood. It's something about the way he's dragging that poor trunk...  He looks very dejected, and more than a bit lost. He is walking towards an unidentified university building.  His name is Jones Dillon. We don't really learn *why* he seems so unhappy, other than that he hasn't actually chosen this university--it was dictated by the terms of his grandfather's will, as we later find out. Which doesn't explain everything, but then there is a depth to the character that may be beyond the script--this is a boy both young and old for his age, rather like a certain actor...

Leaving his trunk in the hallway, we now see him seated all alone in an auditorium, where the janitor asks if he is lost. He replies in the negative, and is soon joined by all manner of other students, jostling and talking and goofing off, while he remains solitary and silent in their midst.

Next we follow him to his dorm, where he is lying on the bottom bunk, aimlessly hitting the mattress above him. Enter his new room-mate, a skinhead who proceeds to announce that he listens to ska music and ONLY ska, and *especially* not country like the other people around there. (Although we are not specifically told this, the story is set in Kansas.) This is obviously not going to work, and he drags his suitcase back out and begins searching for an apartment using newspaper ads. (He also has a packet of matches in his hand, and since we are led to believe that he takes up smoking on the spur of the moment a bit later on, one wonders why he has them...) Along the way, a punk with a mullet and his very 80s-hair girlfriend very nearly run him down, and make make fun of him. He does, however, get an appointment to see the apartment immediately, and off he sets with his trunk strapped to the roof of the cab.

The boy is a bit naive and a bit of a geek, as we see when he looks at the apartment--or actually, is made to look at it. He appears quite ready to take it almost sight-unseen, but his new landlady wonders about his lack of curiosity about it, so he does a cursory inspection (including turning off a dripping tap). He also proceeds to write her out a check for an entire year's rent, leading to some suspicion on her part, and his explanation that he inherited the money from his grandfather and that he's there because it's his grandfather's alma mater--and that it's better than being in Texas with his mother. (However, another little plot problem here--the prepayment on the rent is $12,000, which seems rather out of line for a two-room walk-up in Kansas, even near a university.)

Now that he has a place, he gets out his red manual typewriter and types a letter to his father, going into his experiences that day--sort of. The encounter with the punk has a bit of a twist when, after mullet-guy calls him a "punk" and "kid" and drives off, Jones pulls a bazooka out of his trunk and blows them AND their car to smithereens. We begin to see how Jones deals with life, and get a glimpse of the Walter Mitty part of his character. Elijah has a rather odd, unplaceable accent--Jones says later that although his mother is from Texas, he spent most of his life on the east coast in boarding schools--and we hear him narrating this and future letters to his father. These letters are never mailed since he doesn't know his father's address--he just folds them and puts them in his steamer trunk, which is full of similar letters. We find out that the trunk and the typewriter are his only mementos of his father.

On his way home, he stops to get some beer, and we see another of his coping mechanisms. He shows a fake ID to the storekeeper, who naturally refuses him. Then he launches into a story about his mother being an addict, about having a bone disease, and how he began suffering even before  he was born...    He gets the beer, and as his new neighbor Jane (Franka Potente) comes into the store to buy cigarettes, the now-concerned shopkeeper asks if he needs anything else--and he gets cigarettes as well.

He follows Jane all the way back to her apartment building--of course, he lives there too, but she doesn't know that. So when he tries to follow her in the door, she begins screaming and sprays mace in his face. As he writhes on the floor in pain, the downstairs resident, Brad (Aaron Pearl) comes out (dressed in shorts and cowboy boots, and carrying a 6-shooter) to ask Jane if she needs him to shoot the intruder--only to be told that she'll handle it. She then retrieves her camera and takes a photo of the groaning Jones, while Brad swipes two of the now-loose cans of beer and retreats back into his apartment. The mystery of the intruder's identity and purpose is made clear by the telephone guy, who comes down the stairs to report that apartment 2B ("are you 2B or not?") is now wired, and the final resident, Lisa (Mandy Moore) arrives just in time to witness Jane's discomfiture at her mistake. Lisa stops by  his apartment to welcome him, but doesn't come in because he has nowhere for her to sit... 

Later that night, he calls up his mother (Elizabeth Perkins) to update her on what's happening in his life. We see a very dysfunctional relationship but suspect that there is probably love underneath all the layers of petty bickering. We also learn that Jones doesn't know his father, but thinks he remembers bits about his father talking about all the places he's been all over the world. Jones has been trying to pry the details out of his mother for years, but she keeps putting him off. She is amazed that he is attempting to live on his own, and opines that there is no one less able to take care of himself. Jones replies that she is right, and he's been interviewing help, and makes reference to a Cantonese masseuse that he is going to check out. As he talks about her, we see her, which becomes the pattern for this type of waking fantasy. After he's done talking to his mother, he looks longingly at the fantasy girl for a few more seconds, then she slowly disappears.

(In another fantasy girl phone exchange with his mother later, he has a belly dancer delivering him bagels. And when his mother asks if he has dropped out of school yet, as she expected, he says that no, in fact, he's doing work for a class just then, in Life Drawing, and we see a woman, bare back turned to him, very artistically draped...)

Jones' next Walter Mitty-type episode isn't a letter to his father OR a waking fantasy, but instead a dream, as he pictures Ma showing up at his door, and demonstrating that happy bed firsthand for him. Throwing him onto the bed (which even in his dream he realizes shouldn't be there yet), she jumps on top of him and begins to rip his shirt off. Just as she's really getting into it, there's a knock on the door, and Oh no! It's her sons. Jones wakes up to realize it's a dream, but then his hand slides into the front of his pants, he groans, and goes off to the bathroom to grab a handful of toilet paper to clean himself off. Then there is a honk, a yell, and the sons are there for real this time, and about to toss his furniture from the back of their truck. He looks out the window and yells a very anguished "NO!" (which we will all recognize as the scream at Gandalf's fall) and runs downstairs to try to reason with the rednecks. He's getting nowhere fast when he's saved by the appearance of Brad with his revolvers, who talks to the "boys" in the only language they recognize and manages to save the furniture. Jones is happy for himself and pleased with Brad, and boasts to Lisa that he now has something for her to sit on--she wonders aloud if it's clean...  So when Jane comes home later and peers in his open door, she sees Jones kneeling on his couch, rump in the air, sniffing the cushions.

His next fantasy finds both Lisa and Jane sitting in the front yard, on that self-same couch, watching approvingly and applauding as he (sporting a straw cowboy hat and a six-gun) and Brad win a shoot-out with Ma's two sons, and drive them off. (and btw, Elijah *does* shoot right-handed in this movie, unlike "Chain of Fools"). The soundtrack for the gunfight is Paul Simon's "Me and Julio", and it's one of the more fun fantasy segments.

The gun-toting Jones becomes a bit more of a reality when Brad later takes the boy out back to teach him to shoot, stringing up full cans of beer as targets--he says they are easier to shoot than empty ones. They alternately talk and shoot, and Jones becomes quite good, eventually stringing the now-empty plugged cans together and hanging them on his wall. Lisa comes in to watch him doing this (he has to stand on his new bed to reach high enough to staple up the ends of the string of cans) and joins him in jumping on the bed--just as Jane spots them through the window...  She seems destined to always catch Jones at embarrassing moments.

Now we expand on the growing relationship between Lisa and Jones.  It seems that Lisa and Jane are definitely NOT friends, and Lisa is happy to use Jones as one-upsmanship against her. At one point, feeling badly for how she has treated him, Jane goes to Jones' door to give him an 8x10 print of the photo she had taken on his arrival--his pain over being sprayed with mace. However, on getting no answer to her knock, she slips the photo under his door where where Lisa, who had heard the knocking, retrieves it. Lisa begins to spend more time with Jones, talking about her acting career (which is going nowhere), he runs lines with her from a really moronic period piece she is in (in which she plays a woman in love with a man who returns from war without any arms, and in her big scene, she says "you can hold me without arms... Hold me!") and they also lay on a rug out on the portion of the roof that Jones can access through his window. In fact, Jones spends a lot of time out on that roof, and one day Jane snaps a photo of him sitting there meditatively, smoking a cigarette.

Lisa teaches Jones a few things about independent life--first it's the furniture, then wine, then glasses, and eventually how to use a corkscrew. Will she also teach him... He goes to her play, and even speaks some of the lines along with her and her armless costar. When the audience goes into hysterical laughter during the "you can hold me without arms" section, he is mortified--the play is truly dreadful. He tells her later, in response to her statement of that very fact, that SHE was good, and she asks "Not just compared to you?" with a little smile, that shows maybe there is a little more depth to Lisa than we have credited. His comforting of her leads to the inevitable, and they do finally get to bed, but when Jones appears a bit lost, she sarcastically inquires if she's his first. When he hesitates, she sits up in horror, realizing that indeed, Jones is a virgin. She rapidly begins to put her clothes back on, and tells Jones that they shouldn't be doing this, not for his first time, that his first time should be special and reserved for someone with whom he's in love. She says that at his age (17), she'd been in love several times. He slowly begins to agree with her, says he really *doesn't* want to be doing this, all unaware of the reaction that this causes. She leaves, now chagrined on TWO counts.

As Lisa and Jones' relationship cools off, he finally begins to make some headway with the elusive Jane, and continues to spend a lot of time with downstairs neighbor, Brad. He and Brad have a lot of long talks, in one of which he learns that Brad knows about both his abortive relationship with Lisa and that he is now spending time with Jane--he can hear a lot from his apartment, but he never tells. He also seems to know what the problem is between Lisa and Jane, but man of his word, he says it's one of those "upstairs stories" that he would never reveal. He does encourage Jones to go after Jane, though. The boys are working together first on Brad's motorcycle, and occasionally Jane's car. It turns out that the motorcycle (which Jones eventually inherits) is the legacy of Brad's most recent lover, Rocky. Brad is shocked to suddenly realize that he hasn't had sex since Rocky left, 3 years ago. Jones' response: "Whoa." Brad: "Whoa? Did you say 'whoa?' I think 3 years of celibacy deserves more than 'whoa.'" Jones: 'Try 17." Brad: "You mean?"  Jones: "Well, the first 12 were easy." Brad: "Whoa."

Over the course of several conversations, Jane has cryptically mentioned "Steve." It's clear that this is her former boyfriend, and eventually we learn he was a musician with whom Jane fell almost instantly in love, but all too soon he disappointed her, and she is reluctant to commit herself again. No further details are forthcoming. Brad, when asked about Jane's attraction to Steve, theorizes that it is a biological weakness some people have for black leather/guitar player types, and admits that he has suffered from bouts of it himself.

What is Jones to DO with Jane, though? He helps her out when her car is recalcitrant, taking her to work in a taxi (she works in "The Record Store" which, paradoxically, sells only CDs--and Jones has neither a turntable nor a CD player). They finally break the ice when she realizes he hasn't been ignoring her peace offering of the photo--he in face never received it, and she correctly guesses why. But Jane doesn't "date" or go to movies or to restaurants. So he lets HER pick, and they go to the horserace, where she teaches him the finer points of both horses and betting. As the day progresses, we see him get the hang of it, until finally his horse wins, and in a spurt of over-enthusiasm, he kisses Jane. She slaps him.

One night she is driving with Jones in the car, and they are drinking and talking when a deer unexpectedly appears on the road, and Jane drives into a ditch trying to avoid it. Jones ends up with his arm in a cast, but Jane is in the hospital in traction. Jones and Brad spend a lot of time fixing her car up as good as new, but it becomes evident quickly that Jane has reconsidered her position on Steve--she calls him, and he rushes to her bedside from 2000 miles away. Jones is disconsolate, and he has a revelation. Meeting Steve in the hospital corridor one day, he asks: "You fucked her, didn't you? Lisa?" Steve: "Yeah. You?" Apparently Jane's photo of Lisa (which we have seen) nude and wrapped in only a scarf, was intriguing enough that Steve wanted to see what was underneath. Once he had, that was it, but it was enough to wreck his relationship with Jane. Jones and Jane have a lot of long talks, in one of which he tells her about his virginity, and mentions that he almost did it once, *very* recently. It's fairly clear to Jane with whom this nonevent nearly happened. She also talks him into explaining what it is he's always typing, and he lends her the letters, which she is not allowed to show anyone else.

One morning during this time, Jones finds an unexpected visitor at his door: his mother, Blanche, coming to see if he's OK. She is wowed by her son's independence and sophistication (he serves martinis on his rooftop hideaway), and we see quite clearly that she thinks the world of him (although he doesn't necessarily recognize that). He's bitter about her unwillingness to talk about his father, and how he spent so much of his childhood away at boarding school--which she insists was not her idea at all, but her father's. She was a daughter of wealth, and her father didn't approve of Jones' father. Jones suddenly realizes that it isn't something Blanche did that drove his father away, as he had always supposed, but the very fact that she got pregnant with him.

Blanche and Jones come to a sort of truce, and agree to talk more in the morning. Very early the next day, we see Blanche putting on her makeup and packing. She briefly looks in on the sleeping Jones, then pulls out his typewriter and leaves him a note. After she finishes, she calls a cab and leaves without waking him. When Jones reads the letter, he learns that despite what he *thinks* he remembers, he never knew his father, who drifted away before he was born. Blanche had loved him very much, and treasured their time together, but he was apparently one of those people "you can only hope to slow down, not hold onto forever." He never made any attempt to get back in touch with them, and Blanche can't give Jones his address because she doesn't know it. Jones is distraught over this news, which turns his world on end.

Jones tries to reason with Jane when she leaves the hospital, but it's too late: she's made up her mind to leave and go live with Steve. She asks him a big favor: to drive her the 2000 miles to Steve's, in return for which he can keep the car. He agrees, since they're, as she keeps saying, friends. One night along the way, they're sharing a twin-bedded motel room, and he comes out of the shower to find her getting ready for bed. He hasn't given up yet, but all she can say is "You're nice." He replies: "I could fuck Lisa if nice is a problem for you." They go to their separate beds, but as Jones is about to go to sleep, he hears the other bed creak, then Jane is suddenly spooned up behind him, whispering to him that "this isn't happening." But this time it *does* happen, yet it changes nothing. They get to Steve's, he helps her get her stuff out of the car, and after a little sniping from Steve and one last attempt to get her to come back with him ("but it DID happen, and it MEANT something"), Jones drives off. On his way back, he sits nearby and watches vandals demolish Jane's car, effectively putting PAID on that portion of his life.

So, willing or not, Jones has a new life to begin. When he gets back to the apartment building, Lisa is moving out. She's got a job! She gives him the semi-nude photo of herself and offers to autograph it for him ("It will be worth something one day") but he merely takes it with a smile and says he'll put it away. He packs up his typewriter in the trunk, and mentally banishes all his fantasy girls (we get one last look at them as he closes them off in Jane's old room) and takes out the motorcycle. To the strains of "Born to be Wild" he confronts again (this time in real life) the punk and his bimbo girlfriend, and puts them in their places (flipping a cigarette into the boy's lap, then kissing the girl and telling her to "never change your hair"). He goes back to his dorm, handcuffs his would-be room-mate to the bed, and turns the radio to a country station. Then he's motoring down the freeway when the music slows and stops, and his bike does the same. As he's standing beside it, a passing motorist slows down, and he runs up to take the ride from whoever was kind enough to stop. It's Jane, of course, asking what he had done to her car...

FIN