Synopsis

In Steal Me, writer/director Melissa Painter (Admissions, Wildflowers) has crafted a refreshingly honest portrayal of relationships - sexual and otherwise - around a 15-year-old kleptomaniac boy, Jake (Danny Alexander), who arrives in a small Montana town searching for his prostitute mother.

Through Jake’s trouble of tracking down his mother, he befriends Tucker (Hunter Parrish), a corn-fed local boy who catches Jake red-handed stealing the radio right out of his truck. After a foot chase and a brief scuffle, the boys ultimately become friends, discovering that each has something the other wants -- Jake has a quiet mystery and total freedom, while Tucker has stability and a happy home. At first, Jake brings Tucker out of his shell, convincing him to pursue his longtime crush, Lily Rose (Paz de la Huerta). However, when Tucker’s family reluctantly takes Jake in, offering him food, shelter and eventually a job, things grow more complicated.

Tucker’s mother, Sarah (Cara Seymour), uneasy about Jake being there insists he sleep in the barn, but over time a bond begins to grow. Jake, however, is an accomplished and incorrigible thief, and begins stealing small items around the house, not because they are valuable, but for the fetish factor and sentimental value.

Soon he meets the neighbor, Grace (Toby Poser), a newly single mom twice his age. An affair ensues; one that is romantic from Jake’s perspective, but simply sexual from Grace’s point of view.

Eventually, Sarah catches them in the act, furious with Grace she demands that she keep her hands off Jake. Later Sarah consoles him as he lay in her lap in tears. Unable to differentiate between motherly affection and sexual undertones, Jake hits on Sarah, but she quickly states she cares for him just as a kid. Moments after Tucker catches his mother in the act of comforting Jake and thinks it’s something more; in turn, he begins to shut Jake out of his life.

Jake turns to the local troublemakers for friendship, only to be provoked into a breaking and entering scheme, where they set him up by tipping off the cops. He gets away without being caught, but comes home to discover the police had been there – prompting Tucker’s parents to go through Jake’s belongings in the barn. When he notices that they’ve found his box of stolen trinkets, he runs away in humiliation, not realizing that they were touched by their discovery. Certain they had finally learned his horrible secret, that he is a bad kid at heart, Jake sets back to a lonely life on the road.

Director's Comments

From Stealing to Sex, Turning Vice into Inspiration
By Melissa Painter

In writing Steal Me, I wanted to use the framework of a boy who, through a series of encounters with women who are all at different points in their lives, gradually reveals the various facets of his whole self. Since I’m married to a man who grew up stealing things, in part because he was from the ghetto, and in part because of his relationship with his mother -- that was always an intriguing prospect to me.

Personally, my vice as a teenager was to be promiscuous, so I wound that trait into my husband’s childhood thievery, and fleshed out the character of Jake. The inspiration came easily, as I’m fascinated by people’s compulsions, in this case stealing and promiscuity, and how these actions are designed not simply to get something from someone else, but to fill a void within oneself. As a teenager, Jake has that massive disconnect between how he sees himself and how the world sees him. To me, the evolution of an adult is melding those two things -- stepping away from the tremendous concern over what others think of you, and discovering a sense of self.

Jake’s mother, being a prostitute, was too overtly sexual as he was growing up, and I wanted to convey how that would affect someone in their teenage years. The idea was to create something where I was never going to bored by a single scene, even three months into the editing process, so I wrote what I knew about -- things I’ve wanted to explore for a long time. The scenes in Steal Me are true, in a universal sense, and they’re very intimate to me.

I’m a mother myself now, and a lot has changed in my life, which gives me a little more perspective. In writing the part for Paz de la Huerta (Lily Rose), for example, I was able to create the character of a wild girl in a small town in a way that I never could have ten years ago, and that’s a subject near and dear to my heart.

I was also able to bring more perspective to the relationship between Tucker and Jake, which starts out almost as a love affair, and that lingers just under the surface throughout the film. When I grew up in San Francisco, before the AIDS crisis, if you were cool, then you were probably bisexual -- especially if you were in theater. Every guy I loved was bisexual, and the connection between Jake, Tucker, and Lily Rose comes from my experiences growing up in a time and place where people were exploring boundaries with less fear. In way, given the harsh realities of life today, Steal Me’s romanticism is a throw back to the early eighties.

I think what sets Steal Me apart is that it moves beyond the sex-on-the-surface syndrome seen in most Hollywood portrayals of teenagers, instead showing teen sexuality as we all remember it -- both sweetly romantic and painfully raw. To me, it’s all about what’s possible, and the feeling that anything may happen.