‘Hesher’ is fresh, but also demented

The title character of “Hesher” (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has long black hair, a proclivity for shirtlessness and a giant tattoo of a middle finger on his back.

He drives around in a beat-up black van blasting Metallica, smoking pot and doing what he pleases.

When 13-year-old TJ (Devin Brochu) inadvertently reveals that Hesher is a squatter in a half-constructed condo, the drifter believes it only fair to move into the shabby suburban home where the boy lives with his father (Rainn Wilson) and grandmother (Piper Laurie).

The house is in a stupor of malaise, still mourning the death of TJ’s mother two months earlier. The heavily medicated father is nearly catatonic. TJ is obsessed with keeping their red station wagon, wrecked from the fatal accident that left him with a cast on his arm.

He’s a tough, scrappy kid who’s been left in a vacuum of parental oversight to fend for himself, including against a school bully (Brandon Hill). He’s saved from one beating by a woman who interferes (Natalie Portman, who also co-produces).

Awkwardly inserted into the film, she’s a lonely cashier who, like everyone else in “Hesher,” could use a little fun.

Hesher is a kind of demented wake-up call. He’s similar to Brad Pitt’s character in “Fight Club”: a grungy, brash, violent force of life who revels in shattering convention and blowing smoke in the face of talk-it-out therapy. And he, too, seems almost a fictional projection (something the movie alludes to).

It’s the feature film debut for Spencer Susser, the lone American in the loose Australian collective of filmmakers called Blue-Tongue Films, who wrote the script with David Michod (the director of last year’s critical hit “Animal Kingdom”).

Susser’s talent for working with actors comes through. The young Brochu is an honest 13-year-old, biking everywhere and distrustful of every adult. Laurie is touchingly sincere, even as she grows senile.

Gordon-Levitt is clearly having the most fun. He stomps around, hardly ever noticing those around him except for an occasional, sly sideways glance or a mean stare.

The lone exception is Wilson’s overwrought, one-note performance as the grieving father.

Like some other Blue-Tongue movies, “Hesher” can be gratuitous in its violence. It’s generally mangy and there are obvious missteps (like the cliched flashback scene to the car accident).

But it nevertheless manages to be more emotionally true than the majority of the films coming out of Hollywood.