Chronicle is a super...hero? movie starring Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan, Alex Russell, Ashley Hinshaw, and Michael Kelly, directed by Josh Trank (who would go on to direct Fan4stic, which...didn't work as well).
During his senior year of high school, lonely abused senior Andrew (DeHaan) starts recording everything on an old video camera. His cousin Matt (Russell) gets him out to a party, where the two of them plus popular and affable jock Steve (Jordan) discover a Blue Glowy Thing in the ground. Cut to some time later where they're practiced with their brand-new badass telekinesis!
All three lads develop the same powers, and as they practice they get stronger. Andrew is probably the most skillful, but he's also angry at the world because his mother (Bo Peterson) is dying and his father (Kelly) is an abusive drunk, and so he lashes out, nearly killing a man. Matt, who reads philosophy for fun and is very much stuck in the teenage "I'm above all this" mode tries to impose a little order and morality, but then gets distracted by the cute vlogger Casey (Hinshaw) and doesn't really notice as Andrew gets more and more detached from the world. Andrew winds up accidentally killing Steve in a lightning storm, and that sets off the downward spiral that leads to Andrew trying to use his powers to steal money for his mother's medicine, her dying, and him going on a rampage through Seattle that ends with explosions, flying buses, and Andrew dead with a spear through him.
Chronicle is told entirely through found footage, and where things get interesting is when it switches from Andrew's (or Casey's) handheld camera to, say CCTV footage from the convenience store, hospital, or police body cam. The implication since we're jumping back and forth between camera sources is that someone cut all this together, but since the movie ends with Matt leaving Andrew's camera on a mountaintop in Tibet I don't think that really tracks. The found footage conceit is cool and allows us to skip some of the little narrative concerns that might otherwise get in the way (what is the Glowy Blue Thing, for example), though I think of think Trank should have either committed to explaining where all this footage ended up or committed to having it all from one source, although that probably would have severely limited our perspective as viewers.
But with that said, it's a pretty solid movie. Jordan and DeHaan have gone on to bigger-budget things (DeHaan played Harry Osborn in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, while Jordan, of course, has really blown up between Creed and Blank Panther), while Josh Trank kinda hasn't (after Fan4stic was panned, he did a biopic about Al Capone starring Tom Hardy that I'm really surprised I haven't seen), but that's kinda it. But digressions aside, Chronicle is good - the cast is smaller and the chemistry between them is nice. Alex Russell is kinda bland, and he doesn't read as a high school senior, but he carries his scenes well enough. All three boys nicely showcase different experiences of high school - Steve is popular and on top of the world (also his parents are rich), Matt is bored and ready to be done but generally doing fine, and Andrew is miserable and being tortured and beat up on a regular basis but who cares because he's weird and kind of creepy. Now let's give all of these kids superpowers!
The effects mostly hold up. The close-up stuff, where we're supposed to watching on Andrew's new camera, sometimes gets a little obvious CGI, but stuff like the talent show looks amazing because we're seeing what a viewer in the audience would see. I do wonder about the artistic choice to have a "BWOOOWM" noise accompany powerful uses of the telekinesis; is that diagetic? If so...what is it? But that's a minor point.
Overall it's perhaps not as profound as it wants to be and could have gone harder on its premise, but it's a solid superhero/sci-fi drama and there aren't too many of those.
My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next up: Drag Me to Hell
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