THE NEON BIBLE, writer-direct…

THE NEON BIBLE, journalist-director Terence Davies first literary adaptation, is based on John Kennedy Toole’s coming of life-span thriller become established in the 1930s and 1940s Bible hit. Similar to Davies’s autobiographical TRILOGY, the film is a series of remembrances by 15-year old David (Jacob Tierney), who reflects back on his troubled puberty while riding a discipline to an unknown following. As a piddling attendant, David (Drake Bell) was a friendless outcast who watched his angry father, Forthright (Denis Leary) emit the frustration of their poverty by beating his wife, Sarah (Diana Scarwid). David gets a playmate when enthralling Aunt Mae (Gena Rowlands) comes to live with them. Mae regales David with stories of her days on the stage, and provides some security in the midst of his parents’ troubles. Ignoring Mae’s impact, however, David is mannered to plant up too soon, and finds himself in a shocking predicament. With his aqueous, languorous camera movements, Davies guides the viewer through David’s familial person and the human being of the South at a certain moment, with its revival meetings and book burnings. Davies’s cinemascope absent-mindedness is another compelling examination of his personal themes of immaturity, reminiscence, and creed.

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