Does he have talent? It simply isn’t opposable

“THUMBSUCKER” is a difficult movie to classify, and that’s OK with first-time feature film director Mike Mills. “People don’t know where to put it, marketing-wise,” he said. “It didn’t fit into any of the categories.” On one level, it’s a comedy. After all, it’s about a teenager who still, well, sucks his thumb.

“But there’s another, far more poignant level there as well. I love that combination,” Mills said. “To me, happy and sad are always right next to each other in my life.”

Mills, 39, who wrote the adaptation of Walter Kirn’s novel, said he went through nearly a hundred in-person auditions and watched close to 200 tapes trying to find just the right person to play the main character, Justin Cobb.

And then he found Lou Taylor Pucci, who was barely out of high school and had just one movie to his name when he took his spot on set alongside the likes of veterans Keanu Reeves, Benjamin Bratt, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D’Onofrio and Tilda Swinton.

Luckily, Pucci proved himself a quick study: He walked away with the Special Jury Prize for acting at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and the Silver Bear for best actor at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival. The awards sit next to the Gandalf and Edward Scissorhands action figures in Pucci’s New Jersey bedroom, and the now-20-year-old is still at a loss to explain how it all happened.

Reflecting back on his Sundance award, Pucci said, “They said my name and that was it, and everybody clapped. I had no idea what to say when I got up there.

I don’t even know what I said.”

The actor and director made a good team -- Pucci and Mills were rookies, in a sense. It was a learning process throughout for Mills, who spent six years on the project, including finding out how to get it financed. “I feel like I went to the longest graduate school ever,” Mills said. His lesson? “Do what you want in your life, or why be here?”

The process hardly discouraged Mills from trying to put out another movie that’s tough to place into a genre or category. “The world is starving for nonpackaged, emotional messages,” he said.

The script he’s writing now? According to Mills, it will be even harder to get financed than “Thumbsucker.”