‘Our Hero, Balthazar’ is a disturbingly funny buddy comedy

Imagine a lump of coal, covered in soy sauce, floating at the heart of a black hole. That gives you a sense of how dark the satire is in “Our Hero, Baltazar.” It’s a terrifyingly funny look into the wounded heart of a culture where misery is monetized and everybody is trying to scam everybody else – and delude themselves most of all.

Balthazar (Jaeden Martell of the “It” movies) is the avatar of such a society, a pampered New York teen who spends his nights posting fake empathy videos on social media. We see Balthazar sobbing into a Ring camera, then coolly analyzing the metrics of the video he has just posted. Whether Balthazar is genuinely upset is irrelevant – what matters is that he looks upset to his followers.

In a way, Balthazar’s histrionics are a dark mirror of the center-left candidate that Balthazar’s mother (Jennifer Ehle) works for, who posts carefully-crafted “thoughts and prayers” videos to respond to the latest atrocity of the moment. At his private school, Balthazar goes along with school shooting drills led by a private corporation. If you’re turned off by a scene in which Balthazar has a meet-cute with a fellow student (Pippa Knowles) while they’re lying on the floor of the school hallway pretending to be victims, “Our Hero, Balthazar” is definitely not for you.

When another school shooting hits the news, Balthazar sees the opportunity to go online and post his latest meltdown, using the right hashtags to bend the algorithm to his whims. In the comments, he hears from someone calling himself “deathdealer_16” who claims to be planning a school shooting.

Solomon’s scenes with his estranged father (Chris Bauer), who tries to use his son’s love to entrap him in an Amway-like MLM scheme involving testosterone pills, are heartbreaking, using a fractured father-son relationship to show how the modern hypermasculinity movement that preys on the insecurities of young men.

Balthazar is horrified, then intrigued. What if he actually tracked down deathdealer_16 and convinced him not to go through with his plans? He would be doing a genuinely good thing – and, more importantly, it would be great content.

Balthazar catfishes his commenter, pretending to be a beautiful woman, and gets his location in north Texas. Deathdealer_16 turns out to be Solomon (Asa Butterfield), a young man who supports his grandmother by working at a convenience store, and shoots tin cans with an AK-47 to blow off steam. Solomon affects an aggro-bro pose that’s the yin to Balthazar’s incel yang, but at heart they’re both deeply broken, lost young men. And, as much as they hate to admit it, they recognize that in each other, gazing across the country’s red-blue divide.

The two young actors are excellent. Martell plays Balthazar as deeply annoying and manipulative, yet you can sense that he’s yearning for something authentic in his life. Butterfield, the former child star of “Hugo” and “Ender’s Game” who is almost unrecognizable in his scruffy beard and bad-dye-job hair, gives Solomon a similar fragility beneath his attempts to affect a tough-guy swagger.

Solomon’s scenes with his estranged father (Chris Bauer), who tries to use his son’s love to entrap him in an Amway-like MLM scheme involving testosterone pills, are heartbreaking, using a fractured father-son relationship to show how the modern hypermasculinity movement that preys on the insecurities of young men.

The bond between the two young men grows combustible, especially when Solomon shows Balthazar how to fire a gun, and the sensitive New York liberal teen finds that he likes it. “Our Hero, Balthazar” doesn’t choose the darkest possible outcome for them, but it gets pretty close. It’s an uncomfortable deep dive into the toxic stew of guns, social media and alienation that is so much of modern youth culture – most uncomfortable because of how often it makes us laugh in the middle of such bleakness.

“Our Hero, Balthazar” is now on VOD.