A Spiritual Outlaw Finds Peace
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

“Billy the Kid,” which opens today at the IFC Center, is not a film about the famous outlaw. Like him, though, its subject, a teenage boy named Billy, is a fringe-dweller with shadows in his past. Set in small-town Maine, Jennifer Venditti’s excellent documentary follows this damaged and remarkable young man into the wild frontier of adolescence and charts that territory as assuredly as any film in recent memory.
Billy is a slender, chipmunk-mouthed 15-year-old who wears his dark hair in a balled-up rattail, but that’s not really the first thing you notice about him. He’s twitchy, and there’s something in the way he talks, an off-key interplay of intelligence and emotional volatility, that doesn’t seem quite right. Billy is aware that he sticks out. “I’m not black,” he tells Ms. Venditti’s camera, “not foreign, just different in the mind. Different brains, that’s all.”
Billy’s mother, Peggy, recalls a mental-health specialist telling her that Billy would have to be institutionalized on account of his emotional problems. But to her great relief, his elementary school begged to differ, and now Billy’s life in many ways resembles that of a normal teenager. He sings in the school choir, takes karate lessons, and has survived a crush on a cheerleader that brought humiliating consequences. On a daily basis he faces the Darwinian proving ground of the high-school lunchroom, where his eccentricity puts him at a severe disadvantage.
In many ways, though, it simply exaggerates the sense of awkwardness common among boys his age. And Billy’s unpredictable flashes of insight make him even more sympathetic. (Shortly after a fight with Peggy, he asks her, “Do teenagers always bite the heads off their elders?”) He’s a marvelous underdog, thick in the scrum of adolescence but occasionally at a blissful remove from it, as in one slow-motion scene of him practicing roundhouse kicks in the snow.
Details of Billy’s difficult upbringing gradually emerge. He was a parental challenge early on, Peggy recalls, throwing tantrums so violent he once gave her a black eye. His biological father, a radio disc jockey and crack addict, abused Peggy and then left her. (Poignantly, the father’s influence lives on in his son’s worship of hard-rock bands like Kiss and Van Halen.) Billy’s unseen stepfather, who presumably opted not to participate in the film, also comes across as less than fully committed. That Peggy seems to understand his reticence is a testament to her extraordinary patience and perseverance with her son; scenes from the trailer they share in the woods show a devoted parent calmly and expertly guiding him through his mood swings.
Many of them are a result of Billy’s first true love, as his courtship of a girl named Heather is the main event of the film. After chatting up her younger brother, he introduces himself to her one afternoon in the diner where she works. Like Billy, Heather is noticeably different: A visual impairment makes her eyes quiver. Touchingly, it doesn’t prevent her from casting him affectionate glances while they talk at the counter. He comes back another night, and they go for a walk. It’s not the things they do that are amazing; it’s the fact that Ms. Venditti (along with her cinematographer, Donald Cumming) captures and presents them without a shred of reality television’s camera-ready phoniness. And although the camera doesn’t follow Billy when he ceremoniously leads Heather around a street corner to ask her to be his girlfriend, it actually works out for the better: The microphone he’s wearing picks up his proposal, and their joyful re-entry into the frame, accompanied by the applause of a group of amused locals standing outside the diner, is a small miracle of impromptu filmmaking.
Cannily, the film leaves unnamed whatever syndrome or disorder Billy has surely been diagnosed with. “To me, there’s no such thing as madness,” he says, and by approaching Billy not as a curiosity or a case study but as a human being, the filmmakers are in implicit agreement. Of course, it helps their cause that Billy, whom Ms. Venditti, a casting director, discovered while working in Maine on another film, is a particularly fascinating individual. Everything from his stiff gait and shifty eyes to his protective impulse toward women combines to form a compelling character.
“Billy the Kid” doesn’t sugarcoat Billy’s dark side, either. But because this empathetic film allows the viewer to get to know him so intimately, his interest in serial killers — not atypical for a boy his age — isn’t really any more disturbing than his interest in rock stars and horror movies. By the end of the film, and the brief phase of his adolescence it documents, Billy seems to have distanced himself a bit more from the shadows of his own mind. “All this time I thought my brain — my imagination — was the scary place,” he says. “I realize now that the whole world’s the scary place.”
Begins today at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).