By Randal C. Hill
Austin LeRette appears to be a normal adolescent boy. Well, normal except for such antics as running through crowded school halls on the first day of classes and shouting “Welcome back, everybody!” while wearing the dorkiest hat imaginable because, as he tells his dad, “The chicks love it.”
Austin’s stirring tale is based on the true-life book, “The Unbreakable Boy: A Father’s Fear, A Sense of Courage, and a Story of Unconditional Love,” by Scott Michael LeRette. The movie script, written and directed by John Gunn, stars Zachary Levi (“Chuck,” “Shazam!”) as Scott, the boy’s dad, with Jacob Laval (“The Plot Against America,” “John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch”) giving a stunning portrayal of young Austin.
The irrepressible lad has osteogenesis imperfecta, a rare brittle bone disease, and he’s also autistic, which means he has a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by inflexible patterns of behavior and deficits in social interaction. (Three out of four people with autism are boys.)
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School administrators want to place Austin in a class for students with special needs—to remove the often-hyper lad from the “regular” school population. “He does better when he’s around kids of all kinds,” argues Austin’s frustrated father. “He learns from them, and I think they learn from him, too.”
Scott is having a harder time negotiating life than Austin, spending much of his energy trying not to see his child as a symbol of something broken, but rather as the triumph of an indestructible spirit. It’s a frustrating and often painful journey for the elder LaRette; he tells his wife, “I feel like I’m failing… I wish I could enjoy anything as much as my son enjoys everything.”
See it. Love it. “The Unbreakable Boy” opens in AMC theaters on March 17.
