Sometimes it's hard to understand why the best films, that try to be a little independent, don't get seen. Last night I viewed Harvard Man at a one-time showing that brought the w/d, James Toback, to Kansas City to comment on his film and career. The man is amazing. A self-described "addictive personality" who's gone tortuously from Harvard to Hollywood, he's been called "the closest thing to an auteur that America has produced." Toback's latest film tosses a young, talented cast into a twister of jump-cuts, psychadelics, crime and punishment that leaves one either gasping for breath or begging for more.<br /><br />Adrian Grenier plays a philandering philosophy major at Harvard who, through one of his girlfriends, throws a basketball game for big money and winds up in a heap of trouble. Grenier's character is more than eye-catching. We have a sincere guy who's on the ultimate heroic journey: the search for self. His means are bumbling, as are most's, but what he gains along the way is the stuff of the true individual.<br /><br />The film was shot almost exclusively with a Steadicam, which lead Toback to screw with the linear storyline of the film for editorial as well as narrative purposes. [This was the] "first time I thought editing could be a fun part of the whole process," he remarked after the screening, and it shows. The story is narrative in the traditional sense, but the incessant jumping past slow points to expedite the action, or forward and back in time as interrelated moments are told simultaneously, keep the pacing break-neck.<br /><br />This is a film even teeny-boppers will "get," at least on the surface. Its philosophy is as deep as Linklater's Waking Life, spliced with the action of Peckinpah's The Getaway. It's full of sex, drugs, hip-hop and classical music (Grenier has both playing while he and Gellar get it on in the film's opening scene). It shows a dangerous irreverence to authority figures (Grenier screws his prof and later jumps out of an FBI window). But hell, that's what authority is there for, to set up the limits that the hero must overcome. If you haven't figured that out yet, see this film and maybe you'll begin to understand.