Powder Film Review - Teenage Electric Daydreams

Powder (1995)

We’ve all been there at some point. No matter how hard you try, you don’t fit in. You don’t know why. There’s something that you can’t put your finger on between you and ‘them’. Whether the ‘them’ are your parents, your friends, the people you went to school with, the streets where you live. You feel different, almost like you’re a different species to those around you, and you wish you didn’t. There is nothing you wouldn’t give to fit in like the rest of them. To not feel on edge, to look at people and see something that resembles what you are like in them. To be normal. The kicker is that it feels more acute when you’re young. 

On paper, Powder [DVD] initially appears to be a straightforward coming of age drama. A reclusive young man is pulled out into the world and thrust into the small town spotlight. There are a small few who recognise him for what he is, something special. To the majority he’s the weirdo.
To be different in this community is to be mocked and distrusted. You will be like us, you will be like us, you will be like us or we will break you. The real difference is that Powder truly is special - he has the ability to see people for what they are. He is connected to the electricity in all things. His uniqueness should be a thing that is celebrated, but instead it inspires fear. He stands out from the crowd and so the crowd throws its paranoia, suspicion and self-hatred at him.

Sean Patrick Flanery plays Powder in an endearing performance that draws you into this unusual character. He’s soft (in a good way) and understated throughout, but brings out a real power and anger when he sees the things that people do to each other. Flannery has the ability to make the loner be the one you want to be friends with, and bring real empathy to a character you’ve not quite seen before. He’s well backed up by Jeff Goldblum, Mary Steenbrugen and an ever so slightly miss-firing Lance Henriksen.

Powder doesn’t simply represent the awkward teenager. He represents something much more than that: evolution. The idea that we are not at our peak, but more that the human race is still an awkward teenager itself, working out what it is, who it is and dreaming about what it may be. What will we be like in a thousand years, ten thousand a hundred thousand? The film asks unfamiliar big, big questions in a familiar setting. Most rites of passage films show the victim lose it and exact revenge on his/her oppressors, but Powder bravely takes a different route. It shows a young man attempting to transcend those that are wanting to pull him down to their level, and it shows groupthink at its ugliest. Small minds in a small world all trying to show everyone else how desperately normal they are.

In the end what is normal? The truth of it is that there is no normal. All those people you thought found it so easy, fitting in, making friends in an instant where it seems to take you an age, they’re feeling it to. Fitting in is a kind of faking it. A front so that no one finds out what you’re really like, because if they did maybe they’d laugh or be revolted or sneer so you bury yourself behind a mask. There are a special few who refuse to fake it and stand apart. They should always be cherished because they are signposts to a better future. Powder is an underrated movie that reminds us of that by showing us what we could become.