Nuclear Boy

Every teenager wants to be noticed. Most of them don’t build a nuclear reactor to make it happen.

Aike is 17, and his phone is basically his whole world. He livestreams chemistry experiments from his bedroom and backyard for a small group of online followers, and he gets hurt more often than not. His mom, a nurse who works long hours, figures the scouts might get him out of the house and around real kids. Aike has a different idea. He’s going to build a breeder reactor in her shed, and she isn’t going to know about it.

Director Joren Molter and writer Britt Snel based “Nuclear Boy” on real events. If you’ve heard about David Hahn, the American teen who became known as the “Radioactive Boy Scout,” the outline will ring a bell.

What I didn’t expect was how much the movie cares about why Aike does it. His dad has moved on and seems to have a new family, and Aike doesn’t really know where he fits anymore. Dad works at the local nuclear plant. At one point he invites Aike over, and Aike shows up thrilled, only to be told he can’t touch or join in on anything. Then his father hands him a meltdown protocol on the way out, which is somehow worse. I kept thinking of Homer dragging Bart to the plant in “The Simpsons.” Same setup. None of the jokes.

Later Aike gives a presentation on nuclear energy. His father says he’ll be there. He isn’t.

That’s about all the film needs to tell you. You get it.

His mother is the one who keeps showing up, and that’s where a lot of the dread comes from. The bigger the project gets, the more you start worrying about her too, since she has no idea what’s sitting in her shed.

It isn’t all heavy, though. My favorite shot in the movie is the neighbor kid bouncing on something springy, popping up over the fence over and over to see what Aike is up to. It’s perfectly timed, and it turns into a sweet friendship, maybe the only one Aike has outside of school and home. His hunt for parts is fun too. He passes himself off as a professor with a team of student researchers to get his hands on reactor documents (it works), then gets turned away at a clock shop because he can’t afford the radium. Turns out even a teenage nuclear scientist needs a part-time job.

The longer the film goes, the harder it gets to tell what’s real. Aike’s fans start showing up in person, even at camp. Then there’s Miki. The moment the reactor works, he asks her to be his girlfriend, and it’s endearing as hell. But I couldn’t shake the question of how much of what we were watching existed anywhere but in his head. I’ll leave that there.

Molter shoots Aike off to the side of the frame again and again, with a lot of empty space around him, and the rule-of-thirds compositions do as much to show how alone he is as anything in the script. The score sounds like a small orchestra playing along to the picture, the way old movies used to be scored. It’s lovely in the quiet scenes.

The runtime is only 78 minutes, and the back half gets rough, in a good way. Aike calls his dad to tell him he’s the inventor of the century, and it’s hard to watch how badly he needs to hear something back. When he figures out the reactor is leaking, he also figures out who’s been sleeping a few yards away from it this whole time.

He just wanted to be a scientist. He wanted somebody to look at what he made and be impressed. “Nuclear Boy” takes that seriously, and it doesn’t let him off the hook for what it cost.

“Nuclear Boy” is a Dutch film in Dutch with English subtitles, screening at the Heartland Film Festival.