An eccentric struggles to grow up in ‘Billy’

“Sometimes, to be a hero, you have to endure pain,” says Billy Price, a 15-year-old from rural Maine, toward the end of Jennifer Venditti’s riveting documentary, “Billy the Kid.” Billy wants to be a hero, as in super, as well as an actor, a rock star and a DJ like his stepdad. In fact, he hopes the next movie he’ll be in will be an action picture, and he’ll get to go around town as a vigilante. Until he gets there, though, he’ll have to endure the alienation of being considered “different” in a small town.

Venditti met Price while casting extras for her friend Carter Smith’s short film “Bugcrush.” She was so taken with the bright, awkward, Robert Frost- and “The Terminator”-quoting teenager that she ended up making a documentary about him. The result, her first film, is a movie about adolescence unlike any other; an intimate portrait of a singular personality in the making and a stark look at our culture of suspicion and conformity.

Early in the film we learn that a doctor once told his mother, Penny, that she would likely have to institutionalize Billy his entire life, a diagnosis that was later disputed. After the film was completed, Billy was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism affecting social and communication skills. Even the movie’s promotional materials refer to Billy as a kid with behavioral problems, even though it’s not clear from watching the film that this is Venditti’s view of the situation. Aside from an impatient outburst or two, it’s hard to tell whether his behavior is really aberrant or, as his mother Penny keeps reassuring him, just part of growing up. If anything, you get the sense that most of the timid, cliche-dependent adults around him are hellbent on pathologizing anything out of the ordinary, “the ordinary” having been seriously circumscribed by pop psychology and mass media.

Watching the movie, you get the feeling that, 20 years ago, Billy would have been regarded as an average, run-of-the-mill nerd -- gauche, gawky, smart, harmless. These days, however, he’s eyed with suspicion by teachers and administrators, who treat him with kid gloves and alert his mother when Billy checks out books about serial killers from the library.

During the course of filming, Billy falls deeply in love with a 16-year-old waitress named Heather. (“Years of loneliness have been murder,” he tells a group of men gathered outside the diner to watch the spectacle of Billy’s first love, much to their delight.) Within days he has scared her off with his intensity. The serendipity of this plot development, plus the fact that the scenes at Heather’s family’s diner were shot from multiple angles, has caused some controversy, and Venditti has been accused of staging scenes or manipulating situations. Whatever. It’s clear from the start -- and Venditti has openly stated -- that Billy was an active participant in his story.

In other words, he’s been shaping his image from the first frame, which is not so much a scandal as it is part of the story. Whether or not his love for the rather dull and unprepossessing Heather is indeed the amour fou he purports it to be is a good question, and one worth debating, though not for the purposes of impugning the filmmaker’s integrity.

Far more interesting than going all Oprah on Venditti is to consider how adolescence in the Information Age involves, among other things, being conscious of oneself as a commodifiable narrative. Bright as Billy is, he’s obviously well-aware that “Billy the Kid” is a MySpace page writ large.

Billy makes his life camera-ready by trying to draw neat lessons from his experiences almost as quickly as they happen, partly as a defense against heartbreak.

But if the Heather episode, with Billy’s over-the-top wooing of her grandmother and his ingeniously disingenuous broaching of the boy-girl sleepover issue with his mom, seems at times like part of the story he’s trying to tell about himself, nothing prepares you for the surprise betrayal at the end. Billy’s resilience, though, is nothing short of amazing. Not to mention part of growing up.

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carina.chocano@latimes.com

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MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes. In limited release.