Joe the King

Joe is fourteen, living in a small town in upstate New York at the end of the seventies. His father is the school janitor and an alcoholic; his mother takes her own anger out on the children. Joe falls behind at school and his teachers write him off as lazy. He starts washing dishes at a diner to earn something. Then he starts stealing. His older brother pulls away from him. Nobody asks why the boy is like this; everyone sees only the result. Frank Whaley wrote and directed it, with Noah Fleiss as Joe, Val Kilmer as the father and Karen Young as the mother. Ninety-six minutes. It was his first film and draws on his own childhood. It screened at Sundance and contains one of Kilmer's least-known performances.