Movie Review: 'My Friend Dahmer'

My Friend Dahmer starring Disney Channel veteran Ross Lynch is a unique and daring examination of the serial killer before the killing. Based on the true life graphic novels of John 'Derf' Backderf, a real life classmate of Jeffrey Dahmer at a small town high school in Ohio, My Friend Dahmer doesn’t aim to sympathize with the killer. Rather, like so much of the best true crime media, My Friend Dahmer feeds our fascination with what if and why scenarios. Our minds can’t resist trying to make pieces fit together and true crime adaptations are one way we seek to bring order to chaotic histories.

Jeffrey Dahmer was odd from the very beginning of his life. As a teenager, he collected roadkill that he would bathe in acid so that he could harvest their bones. To what end? He wanted to know what the animals’ insides looked like. It’s a characteristic familiar to many who follow true crime and killers, the bizarre and dangerous fascination with anatomy. It’s the kind of character trait that today might be a red flag but was mostly hidden from people in 1978.

John ‘Derf’ Backderf, portrayed in the film by Alex Wolff, befriended Dahmer as a lark. After witnessing Dahmer have some kind of episode in the hallway of their High School, an episode Derf saw not as a cry for help but as a hip prank, he and two other friends approached Dahmer to form a club based on his prank freak outs that they would document and play witness to at school, at the mall and at grocery stores. It’s easy to see why teenagers would find Dahmer's act to be a subversive, disruptive bit of comedy but from the frame of today, with our growing knowledge of mental illness, it’s not hard to see that Dahmer was seeking attention that wasn’t entirely comedic.

It's a stretch to call these kids friends of Jeffrey Dahmer, they adopted him for their own purposes. My Friend Dahmer is well played in how it shows Dahmer’s inability to genuinely connect with anyone, latching on to any kind of attention he could, even if it meant being the subject of a joke. We get a strong sense of a young man who wanted to connect but couldn’t as his fascination with death overcame his desire to meaningfully connect with living people.

Ross Lynch does a remarkable job of bringing Dahmer to life. His slump shouldered walk and odd gate create an authentic portrait of the aspects of Jeffrey Dahmer, his insecurities and unrealized desires for a normal life. This is a full bodied performance from Lynch and somewhat unexpected from the former star of the very, very light hearted Disney franchise, Austin and Ally. Here, Lynch sublimates all of his bubbly energy and digs deeply into the sorrow that radiated from Jeffrey Dahmer.

That said, I want to reiterate that My Friend Dahmer at no point calls for people to sympathize with Jeffrey Dahmer. My Friend Dahmer is a movie that seeks to satisfy our culture wide desire for a logical reason why terrible people do terrible things. It serves the same purpose as true crime documentaries or even podcasts, like my beloved My Favorite Murder. The true crime genre is driven by an innate desire to bring order to chaos and find some kind of rational understanding of why evil people do evil things.

My Friend Dahmer was adapted and directed by Marc Meyers and it is my first exposure to his work. Meyers acquits himself well, painting a portrait of a fascinating and terrifying person with sensitivity and clarity. Meyers provides details about the life of young Jeffrey Dahmer that don’t serve as excuses or explanations of his behavior. Meyers appears to have the same fascination that many of us have with true crime stories, that desire to make sense of the senseless.