![\"Logo](\"http:\/\/vqt.nlm.mybluehost.me\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/VarietyLogo1-300x86.jpg\")
<\/p>\nOnce in a while, you see an actor who isn\u2019t held back by the decorum that rules even most good actors. Her emotions don\u2019t stay in check \u2014 they spill over the sides. When that happens, you may find yourself connected to that actor in a way that tugs your own buried feelings into the light. To me, the gold standard for this kind of acting is Chloe Webb\u2019s performance in \u201cSid and Nancy\u201d (1986). Webb played Nancy Spungen as a selfish groupie and unabashed junkie harridan, with a wail (\u201cSi-i-i-d!\u201d<\/em>) that could frighten the damned. Yet part of the character\u2019s mental illness is that she had no boundaries; she was all raw feeling torn asunder. Her pain and rage, her desire to be coddled and loved all announced itself with a furious punk purity. Webb broke your eardrums and your heart at the same time. She gave one of the greatest performances in movie history.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not saying that what\u00a0Barbie Ferreira<\/a>\u00a0does in \u201cBob Trevino Likes It<\/a>\u201d is on that level. Yet there are moments when Ferreira\u2019s uncontrolled quality of damaged yearning reminded me of Chloe Webb; that\u2019s how directly she touches the audience.<\/p>\n Ferreira, who is best known for portraying Kat Hernandez on the first two seasons of \u201cEuphoria,\u201d plays Lily Trevino, who lives in a small town in northern Kentucky, where she\u2019s a friendly and aimless 25-year-old slacker. Really, though, she\u2019s a basket case. The film opens with her discovery that her boyfriend cheated on her. He sends her a post-hookup text by mistake, and she writes LOSE MY NUMBER YOU JERK\u2026only to erase the text and send a \u201cnice\u201d message with a smile emoticon instead. That tells us a lot about Lily. She\u2019s a pathological people pleaser, to the point that she denies her own being. An early scene in which she has dinner with her dad, the sixtyish grinning goateed Bob (French Stewart), who lives in a mobile-home retirement community, makes us think that he\u2019s some sort of prickly \u201ccharmer.\u201d But we aren\u2019t seeing the half of it.<\/p>\n Still reeling from her breakup, Lily wanders into a clinic for a walk-in session with a counselor-in-training, and she unfurls her life story. It\u2019s so harsh that the counselor (Ashlyn Moore) winds up in tears. That\u2019s one of the film\u2019s only moments of fake \u201cquirky comedy.\u201d Yet it\u2019s still an amazing scene for the matter-of-factness with which Lily lays out her story \u2014 how her mother, a drug addict, abandoned her when she was four, and how her father did things like lock her in a room for 24 hours, always implying that\u00a0she<\/em> was the problem. But as Lily puts it, \u201cDespite what my father says, I\u2019m pretty sure it\u2019s not entirely my fault.\u201d That she thinks it was her fault at all reveals how people can emerge from psycho family situations with their entire sense of reality stunted.<\/p>\n As an actor, Ferreira has an instinct for comic shading. She makes Lily as charismatically blinkered in her surface sunniness as Jack Black. Yet the key to Ferreira\u2019s performance is that she never uses comedy as a crutch. She shows us, at every turn, the woman who\u2019s buried under the compulsive nice-girl trappings, the woman who Lily herself can\u2019t even see.<\/p>\n She agrees to accompany her dad on one of his dates, and this is where we really catch on to who he is: a Southern-gentleman narcissist, with bizarre cheapskate tendencies. The actor French Stewart makes him arrestingly complicated in his bullying. When Lily accidentally (or maybe unconsciously) sabotages the date, Bob\u2019s inner monster comes out. He no longer wants anything to do with her. And while we can see what a sicko he is, what\u2019s even more overwhelming is how alone this leaves Lily. She works as a live-in health aide to Daphne (Lauren \u201cLolo\u201d Spencer), who has progressive muscular dystrophy, and the job allows her to loll around a lot, but apart from that professional relationship she has no one. And Ferreira lets us feel the agonizing\u00a0gnaw<\/em> of that isolation.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why Lily does something a bit nutty that, in its childlike way, also makes perfect sense. She goes on Facebook and randomly types in her dad\u2019s name: Bob Trevino. A handful of other Bob Trevinos come up. She gravitates to the one with no photograph and sends him a hi-how-are-ya message, asking if the two might somehow be related. She\u2019s reaching out\u2026to a total stranger. Because she has somehow convinced herself that\u00a0maybe<\/em>\u00a0this other person named Bob Trevino\u2026could be\u2026sort of\u2026like her dad.<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n