“Terri” is a droopy-eyed mound of high school blubber, a boy with a girlish name who turns up to class late and clad in pajamas. Among his pursuits are deploying mousetraps, wandering through the woods and being generally dejected.
Excited yet?
You soon will be, because Terri’s principal, Mr. Fitzgerald, is played by John C. Reilly with a dorky bravado that fires up every frame he’s in. While Jacob Wysocki plays the title character with little flair or charisma, Reilly busts out Fitzgerald’s zany hope-fueled energy. In a typically weird outburst that encapsulates the movie’s ability to make you smile and wince at the same time, he says the reason he yells at pupils behind closed doors is to please his decaying receptionist. “She loves it when I lay into you kids,” Fitzgerald tells Terri. “It’s keeping her going.”
Beat. Fitzgerald isn’t kidding: “She’s dying of cigarettes. She’s dying of death.”
The principal starts to help Terri breathe a little, but back home he is stifled by the junky hovel where he lives with no one to look after him except a mentally unwell uncle (Creed Bratton of “The Office”) whose mind oscillates between sharp and cloudy.
Fitzgerald’s forced pep talks earn Terri an unlikely friend: Chad (a small sparkplug named Bridger Zadina), an unnerving boy whose habit of pulling his own hair out has earned him, too, some unasked-for quality time with the principal. Chad stops by Terri’s house and, instead of being appalled, fits right in.
The film’s attempt at a sort of beautiful anguish works best in its middle section. It takes far too long to get going, and it doesn’t have much of an ending.
For quite a while in between, though, it’s a tender little portrait of teen fragility that culminates in a lovely scene in which Chad and Terri have an impromptu party with an unlikely fellow pariah — the most gazed-upon girl in school, Heather.
She is played by Olivia Crocicchia, Tommy Gavin’s younger daughter on “Rescue Me” and now a startlingly assured young heartbreaker. The film may be best-remembered as the one that made casting agents get her reps on speed dial.