Henry Thomas vs. Jeremy Davies
Battle of the Willowy Slackers

In summer movie season -- crammed as it is with the likes of Vin Diesel and The Rock -- one might get the impression that straight women and gay men develop celebrity crushes only on deep-voiced, hard-bodied, sleek-headed titans who look like they could break us in half. Not so! Some straight girls and gay boys are more likely to fantasize about shaggy-haired, unshaven (or preternaturally smooth-cheeked), slouchy, skinny dudes who look as though their primary pursuits in live are collecting vintage vinyl, and smoking. You know the type.

When even Ethan Hawke is playing naïve young cops in big-budget movies, there's simply no denying that the golden age of the screen slacker is behind us; however, the slackers who played them remain, all greasy mops and baggy eyes. And if acting roles dry up for them completely, it's cool; they can always make a lateral move, earning a living by tending bar, or dealing pot.

Jeremy Davies and Henry Thomas have both had a good run of it so far, as screen slackers. Though Thomas will probably spend his entire life living down the gigantic success of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (and the recent twentieth-anniversary re-release probably won't help much), he's done fine work in a variety of settings: a slacker abducted by aliens in Fire in the Sky; a falsely accused (or was he?!) child molesting slacker in Indictment: The McMartin Trial; an eighteenth-century boy-toy slacker in Valmont; a slacker-cum-kidnapper in Suicide Kings; a slacker cowboy in All the Pretty Horses; and a slacker captain of a whaler in...okay, fine, he's not always a slacker -- particularly not when he's playing Ishmael in a Moby Dick TV movie. Davies, for his part, burst onto the scene in quintessentially mid-'90s movies: first, a girl-with-gun neo-exploitation movie (Guncrazy); later -- and more showily -- came Spanking the Monkey, in which Davies plays a slacker who is living at his parents' house (classic) and nursing his injured mother when he and she commence a sexual relationship. Davies has played soldiers of various types and eras in Going All the Way, Saving Private Ryan, and Ravenous, as well as turning up in the usual range of high-minded, unwatchable indie films; the current CQ falls into the latter category, distinguishable from any other piece of indie crap Davies has starred in only in that it's directed by a Coppola. (No, not that one. Or that one. The other one. Yes, there's another one, but there's a reason you've never heard of him.)

Though both Thomas and Davies have worked steadily over the past ten years or so, it can't last forever. Indie films of the kind in which both thrived are getting ever more corporate (like, if Christina Ricci, Jennifer Aniston, and Robin Williams are in all of them, what hope do lesser luminaries have?), and neither actor is going to have a shot of keeping weed on the table if they keep elbowing one another out of the way. Sharing the indie-movie space in I'm With Lucy is a good start. In addition, it might not be a bad idea for at least one of them to start taking Pilates and yoga and getting all buff just to be different (otherwise known as The Tobey Maguire Gambit), because as it is, Henry Thomas and Jeremy Davies totally cancel each other out.

Advantage: Uh, Thomas? At least he's got the Spielberg connection working for him.