Disability biopics, especially the kind that bring audiences to their feet at Sundance, rarely have anywhere to carry us but on a linear journey from pity via empathy to tearful uplift.
The Sessions, a fact-based drama by writer-director Ben Lewin about a polio-stricken man in search of love and sex, goes that route, too, but the movie replaces the obligatory long face with a buoyantly irreverent spirit and a sexual candor rare on American screens. Lewin, who was disabled by polio himself as a child, brings a wicked wit and a keen eye for detail to his adaptation of an article by Berkeley writer and poet Mark O'Brien about his encounter with a sex surrogate.
O'Brien, paralyzed from the neck down since childhood, is played by John Hawkes, an actor of elastic range whose gaunt mug you may recall from his turns as a thuggish crystal-meth addict in Winter's Bone and a seductive cult leader in last year's Martha Marcy May Marlene. Hawkes hasn't channeled his sweet side since he played Miranda July's love interest in her 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know. Here he brings off something trickier — a paraplegic romantic lead with a helium voice, bags of self-deprecating charm and a long-standing desire to get laid.
It's likely that life was pretty dark for the real Mark O'Brien, who wrote of his years of loneliness and self-hatred. Lewin doesn't skip over Mark's sadness or his anger at being so physically helpless, but he puts the spotlight on his gallows humor and insistence on his rights. Mark is looking for love, but he's also looking for sex; at going on 40 years old, he's literally itching to be relieved of his virginity.
Hawkes plays him as both a sensitive poet and a big flirt; he's quite the babe magnet in a platonic way. More than one pretty caregiver comes to adore him, including a fetching Moon Bloodgood in sensible T-shirt and jeans. And Lewin has thrown in a fictional wry priest, played by William H. Macy, to be his comic-relief confidante.
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Father Brendan (William H. Macy) talks Mark through the ethical and religious questions posed by his arrangement.