THE HOTTEST STATE

Anyone who’s suffered through the inferno also known in Texas as “summer” would probably have to concur with that title’s declaration, voiced by the actor-novelist-screenwriter-director and perennial Austinite Ethan Hawke, who’s come a long way since his days as a fresh-faced child actor.  Since 1985, we’ve seen the now thirty-seven-year-old literally come of age on the silver screen, from precocious young sidekick to leading man in his collaborations with another Austin-based filmmaker-made-good, Richard Linklater.  In Hawke, Linklater found the perfect actor to embody his quintessential American dreamer in BEFORE SUNRISE, the nomadic twenty-something adrift in Europe playing opposite Julie Delpy and discovering love.  By the time these two characters met again ten years later in BEFORE SUNSET, Ethan Hawke had already become a bona fide movie star, with roles in high-profile studio films like SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS and TRAINING DAY.  But his heart still clearly lay in those small, intimate dramas, perhaps best exemplified by his own first film as director, CHELSEA WALLS.      

Hawke’s debut behind the camera was a bold and sprawling, borderline experimental look at the poets, artists, musicians and journeymen that have at one time or another called New York’s famous Chelsea Hotel home, and it showed a surprising amount of promise and resourcefulness for a first-time filmmaker with no budget in a film-unfriendly city, boiling over with boho and bonhomie, earnestness and eccentricity, set in a place where the ghost of Dylan Thomas and a legendary blues singer would sometimes share a room.  One of the colorful characters residing behind its walls happened to be played by an up-and-coming young actor, Mark Webber, whose low-key supporting roles in films like Alison Maclean’s JESUS’ SON, Todd Solondz’s STORYTELLING and Jim Jarmusch’s BROKEN FLOWERS suggest an ideal stand-in for Ethan Hawke’s own scruffy, brooding persona.  So it is perhaps not too surprising that for THE HOTTEST STATE Hawke chose him to play the male lead.

 Adapted from the director’s loosely autobiographical novel of the same name, THE HOTTEST STATE is paradoxically more commercial and more personal than his first.  It still retains the experimental, semi-improvisational tone that gave CHELSEA WALLS the flavor of an early Rudolph or Altman film.  This time around, the scope seems larger while the focus narrower.  The story concerns a young actor named William Harding who journeys from the “hottest state” to the “coldest,” heading northeast to New York in hopes of making a name for himself.  He first encounters Sara Garcia (played by Catalina Sandino Moreno, responsible for the awe-inspiring lead performance in MARIA FULL OF GRACE) in a bar near his apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the two quickly find solace in his bed.  At this point, it becomes apparent that the film also has to do with another kind of “hottest state,”  that particularly heated state of mind that young lovers so often find themselves in before the chill of winter arrives, along with its accompaniment, discontent.

The film is a roadmap of emotional landscapes as well as geographical ones, charting the peaks and valleys of their relationship from New York to Texas to a spur-of-the-moment trip down Mexico way.  In the course of the film, they laugh and flirt, scream, argue and occasionally make love.  They act out roles and scenarios for each other, some of which come uncomfortably close to foretelling their soon-to-be doomed love affair.  In the end, what keeps them from each other is the one roadblock they can’t seem to ever surmount.  Both, it seems, moved to New York to escape essentially the same thing – their past.  And once they leave, they have no choice but to face it.  The brief glimpses of wrecked families and abusive caretakers, like the father who first abandoned Harding and his lonely, bitter mother, are especially moving, undoubtedly from the well of troubled personal histories shared by both Ethan Hawke and Mark Webber (before becoming an actor, Webber grew up homeless with his mother on the streets of Philadelphia).  The realism of these defining moments in time, where the past informs the present, manages to move beyond the fictional framework of the storyline into the realm of something you see far too little of in American cinema these days – truth.

           – Jameson West, Associate Programmer, Austin Film Society