Editorial Review:

Product Description:
Days before his 21st birthday, William, a young actor, meets Sara, a seductive singer/songwriter. William quickly falls madly in love with Sara and embarks on a journey that takes him from a Lower East Side tenement to a Mexican hotel room and through the emotional extremities of passion, rage, and need. Yearning for someone to love him back, William's journey forces him to come to terms with his own past and the father he barely knows.

Amazon.com:
At first glance, Ethan Hawke's follow-up to Chelsea Walls is the ballad of a self-absorbed actor and an enigmatic singer. Below the surface, things are more complicated. An adaptation of his 1996 novel, The Hottest State feels more like an exorcism than a love story. Twenty-year-old William (Mark Webber, Broken Flowers), a Texan based in New York, falls for Sarah (Catalina Sandino Moreno, Maria Full of Grace) moments after meeting her. In an instant, they've shacked up together, but she refuses to sleep with him. When he lands a job in Mexico, she agrees to come along, and they finally consummate their relationship. After that, though, she starts to withdraw. The more she moves away, the more desperate William becomes. As depictions of young love go, this one is more painful to watch than most, not because the acting is bad--the cast includes Hawke as William's father, Laura Linney as his mother, and Sonia Braga as Sarah's mother--but because a little William goes a long way. Aside from his anger control issues, he never stops talking. The entire story feels heavily autobiographical, down to William bragging to Sarah that he's a great actor. Assuming the young Hawke was just as boorish, the unvarnished honesty of his portrayal is to be commended. No doubt the writing of the book and directing of the film has helped him to move on, but that doesn't make The Hottest State comfortable viewing--though Jesse Harris's tuneful soundtrack helps to smooth the way. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

This film completely captures the search for perfect total love by youth. The boy, all of 20, meets "the one" who is supposed to be his true love. While portraying the adventure of falling for someone, it also covers the fear and naked exposure. What you get is the dialogue in the boy's mind about it in retrospect, as he views it heartbrokenly. OK, he is self-absorbed and quick to rage, as many reviewers criticize, but he is only 20 for heaven's sake - he will grow beyond it, which in many ways is the true message of the film. Life can be a terrible struggle at that age: sensitivities are extreme, experience lacks depth and hence offers little solace from pain, and childhood trauma casts a powerful shadow.

Mark Webber plays the role with great subtlety, though I think saying he is a new Brando goes a bit far. Much of his acting is in his body language and the atmosphere he brings with him, which are the marks of true talent. The girl is played expertly by Moreno. Of course, her agenda differs from his and she is unwilling to fulfill the role he has created for her in his mind. (After all, you only want what you cannot really get as a youth.) She is at turns manipulative, caring, vulnerable, beautiful, plain, fascinating, and dull. Linney is great in her cameos as the struggling mother who made some poor choices. Braga's cameo as a manipulative alcoholic mother is pitch perfect.

This is not an easy film to watch, but it rang very very true for me. Warmly recommended.

Average Rating:

Rating: - took me back to the sublime, the embarrassing, the total, the unrealistic
This film completely captures the search for perfect total love by youth. The boy, all of 20, meets "the one" who is supposed to be his true love. While portraying the adventure of falling for someone, it also covers the fear and naked exposure. What you get is the dialogue in the boy's mind about it in retrospect, as he views it heartbrokenly. OK, he is self-absorbed and quick to rage, as many reviewers criticize, but he is only 20 for heaven's sake - he will grow beyond it, which in many ways is the true message of the film. Life can be a terrible struggle at that age: sensitivities are extreme, experience lacks depth and hence offers little solace from pain, and childhood trauma casts a powerful shadow.

Mark Webber plays the role with great subtlety, though I think saying he is a new Brando goes a bit far. Much of his acting is in his body language and the atmosphere he brings with him, which are the marks of true talent. The girl is played expertly by Moreno. Of course, her agenda differs from his and she is unwilling to fulfill the role he has created for her in his mind. (After all, you only want what you cannot really get as a youth.) She is at turns manipulative, caring, vulnerable, beautiful, plain, fascinating, and dull. Linney is great in her cameos as the struggling mother who made some poor choices. Braga's cameo as a manipulative alcoholic mother is pitch perfect.

This is not an easy film to watch, but it rang very very true for me. Warmly recommended.

Rating: - a heartbreaking film about heartbreak
****1/2

Ethan Hawke pulls off nothing short of a one-man cinematic tour de force in "The Hottest State," a movie he wrote, directed and briefly appears in. And to top it off, it's based on his own novel.

This low-budget film chronicles the rocky relationship between a struggling Manhattan actor and a beautiful young woman from Connecticut who's come to the city to start a new life for herself as a singer. Originally hailing from Texas, William Harding is not the most ambitious or highly motivated young man when it comes to pursuing his goals or the most monogamous when it comes to his relationships with women, but all that changes when he meets Sarah, "the girl of his dreams." She makes him want to become a better, more stable person, but Sarah has other things on her mind than getting tied down in a relationship, so she essentially keeps William at arm's-length, allowing him only so far into her heart before shutting him out completely. Meanwhile, blindsided by love, William can't seem to figure out why the girl he's ready to devote his entire life to pleasing seems hell-bent on sabotaging their relationship. And, yet ironically, the more aggressively he pursues her, the more he winds up pushing her away.

Thanks to extraordinarily perceptive writing and acting, "The Hottest State" rises far above the average Hollywood romance - its characters more recognizable and complex and its situations more believable and true to life. Both William and Sarah bring a certain amount of baggage with them from their childhoods and previous relationships, but, for the most part, they are just two fairly ordinary young people feeling their way through life, trying to make a go of it as a couple, with all the pain, pleasure and confusion that that entails. And if their demons occasionally get the better of them, well heck, that`s all a part of this game we call love as well.

"The Hottest State" is really an examination of what happens when one half of a romantic couple falls out of love with the other half, leaving the latter no outlet through which to channel that still-smoldering obsession. The movie nicely turns the situation on its head by making it the woman, rather than the man, who's having trouble making the commitment. There are times when both these characters can be maddeningly frustrating to watch, and when, frankly, neither of them is all that sympathetic or likable. But that's merely an indication of just how utterly committed the movie is to the truth of its characters and story - and how highly it respects and values the intelligence and maturity of its audience.

Mark Webber and Catalina Sandino Moreno are simply astounding in their portrayal of two people trying to come to terms with how each one feels about the other, and they are beautifully complemented by Hawke, Laura Linney and Michele Williams in supporting roles. The final confrontation scene between William and Hawke, playing the dad who abandoned him when he was thirteen years old, is searing in what it has to say about the devastating effect an absent parent can have on the psyche of a rejected child - and how that effect can continue on throughout the entirety of that child`s life.

Buoyed by an ending that refuses to cater to generic formulas or the expectations of its audience, "The Hottest State" is a heartbreaking story about heartbreak.

---

Rating: - as i expected and in perfect condition
the dvd was in perfect condition and exactly as i expected from the sellers statement. thank you.

---

Rating: - For Anyone Who Has Ever Had Their Heart Broken
If you have ever screwed up a great relationship you will find this film fascinating..William is YOU/and or me....It has a healing effect in letting the viewer know that others have experienced emtional pain and yet lived through it.....EGO (edging good out) is the real villian here..
Too much self absorbtion keeps one from understanding the object of their affection...One has to really admire Ethan Hawke's courage to put his story on the screen..A very thought provoking film, well worth the time spent watching it..

---

Rating: - Rage of the first love
Ethan Hawke is known to the wide audiences as an actor and Uma Thurman's former husband. But Ethan is more than that: he is a writer of the novel and screenplay "The Hottest State" and he is a film director. In this independent film, Hawke tells a (universal) story of the first love. Kind that we feel only when we are young: it is intense, all consuming, irrational and wild. And when it is not returned with the same measure, or worse yet, when it is outright rejected by one of the people in the relationship, it can incapacitate person for a long time. It is at that time of hardship that we turn to people closest to us - our parents - in search of some advice, wisdom and guidance on how to overcome such overbearing emotional chaos. While film touches up life experiences most of us can relate to, I had an eerie feeling that, for Hawke, it is deeply autobiographical and personal account. In some moments, I felt like Hawke was loosing his way of being authentic - he shows two lovers in the hotel room where the girl has a tablecloth on her head, that simulates Spanish headscarf - almost like homage to one of the Picasso's paintings of his first wife Olga. Hawke is also paying homage to 20 years ago old movies like "The Last Picture Show" and "Paris, Texas" both fine movies, but "The Hottest State" just does not meet their intensity. Very fine music in this film, definitely good taste. Lots of potential here, but young Ethan Hawke has lots to learn yet. Let's hope he and Peter Bogdanovich ("The Last Picture Show"'s director) get to know each other well, so Bigdanovich can mentor young Hawke about directing and visual arts (paintings). While Sonia Braga was great, Laura Linney's performance was not up to the level I am used to seeing her at. Ethan Hawke himself also has a small, but powerful role in this movie.

see more

Related Items:

The Tracey Fragments

The Hottest State

The Hottest State

The Walker

Bordertown