An 18-year-old basketball star who is being recruited by Cornell University seems to have it all figured out: captain of his team, a good student, has a longtime girlfriend and some good friends. But at home he's struggling with his troubled father who has a gambling addiction. His mother tries to keep the family afloat but does so with great emotional and financial sacrifice.
Freundlich clearly likes to dig in deep with this kind of character material, and here it pays off in ways it really hasn't in some of his previous feature work.
The overly-contrived basketball game finale is classic Freundlich (which is to say eye-rolling), but there are times even he, not just his excellent actors, gets things right.
While the performances are strong in this coming-of-age drama, it suffers from being too familiar and predictable, with wobbly, hand-held camerawork continually breaking the storytelling's spell.
