The Hottest State: Critic Reviews

If the words ''based on a semiautobiographical first novel'' don't send chills up your spine, how about ''adapted for the screen and directed by the author''?

Ethan Hawke's earnest, talky film The Hottest State, which he adapted from his own semi-autobiographical 1997 novel, doggedly peels away the gloss to dive into the emotional swamp where two young people get lost in each other.

Buy the CD and skip the movie.

Hawke quite capably taps into the bittersweet complexities of young, love-struck idiocy.

Hawke, though, who is very good as the young man's estranged father, had best stick to what he does best.

[The two main characters] are in all honesty the least sympathetic and most egregiously boring romantic pair that I've seen onscreen in ages.

Will the world be different, or their lives irrevocably changed, if they break up? I don't think so. Their tree falls in the forest, and nobody cares except the termites.

Ethan Hawke's film, based on the novel he wrote a decade ago, should come with a warning that it may cause bruising from heavy-handed dialogue.

As a director Ethan Hawke has learned a great deal from his mentor, Richard Linklater.

[Director] Hawke's sincerity - especially in his terrific new film, The Hottest State -- is also his saving grace.

The Hottest State takes a good deal of time to heat up and fails to generate much more than a lukewarm empathy for its petulant main characters.

As a bonus it's got the best soundtrack of any movie this year. Hawke, who is the first cousin once removed of Tennesee Williams, proves himself to have a good eye for the small world of big love.

As soon as the credits start rolling, you can't wait to get out.

Hawke has made this movie his way and the result is a story that is by turns romantic and disquieting.

Lacking depth or anything that's actually funny or sad, and with lead performers who are given more responsibility for the success of the film than they can handle, the film will be a tough sell.

Breaking up is hard to do. So is making a movie about it. Ethan Hawke, in his adaptation of his own novel, doesn't try very hard. Or maybe he tries too hard.

If nothing else, Hawke has managed to recreate, with neurological immediacy, the sensation of being harassed by a selfish, clueless ex-lover.

The film is perfectly fine indie fare, but the plot and the characters seem a little more self-indulgently autobiographical than compelling.

Though there are some nutty and offbeat moments in The Hottest State, these young characters fail to generate any chemistry or 'heated state,' despite their tender years and simmering hormones.

What's apparently deeply personal for Hawke winds up deeply torturous for the audience.

Moody relationship drama is best for adults.

Not the hottest movie.

This is a beautifully made, involving film, but it would have been so much stronger with a bit of careful editing.

Everything we see is tinted by a rose-colored self-fondness, down to the perfectly mussed bedheads, the unusually capacious apartments, the lousy bar music that's supposed to be really good.

The movie is crisply shot and obviously heartfelt, but search elsewhere if you want the same honesty Hawke displayed as an actor in 1995's Before Sunrise and its 2004 sequel Before Sunset.