ANDREW GARFIELD enters the bar of an upscale Beverly Hills hotel as if by accident. With a few days' worth of boyish scruff, a backpack, long shorts and a flannel shirt, he doesn't look like an award-winning, up-and-coming star-to-be. He looks a little like a hitchhiker who might get the boot.
Yet soon after settling into a table on a sunny veranda he makes clear just why he's there. It's no accident. Slightly wary but inquisitive, sometimes stumbling over his words before locking onto a fit of articulateness, he is bright, engaged and committed.
Garfield stars in "Boy A," which opens in Los Angeles on Friday, giving a dazzling performance shot through with a bracing sincerity, emotional opacity and teeming with an internal life that unfolds like a delicate origami. In England, "Boy A" was screened on television, and Garfield picked up a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for best actor (as did John Crowley for best director).
"Boy A," adapted by Mark O'Rowe from the novel by Jonathan Trigell, is the kind of film that works better the less you know about it. Buoyed by a poetic simplicity, it is rigorously structured with a careful, methodical way of revealing information. It isn't spoiling much to say that "Boy A" is about a young man who committed a crime as a child and is newly released from custody. Aided by his caseworker (the reliable Peter Mullan), even as he struggles to fit into adult life -- a new job, maybe a girlfriend -- his past continues to haunt him.
Crossing the Atlantic
Garfield, who turns 25 next month, was born in America and moved with his family to England while just a small boy. After drama school he began gaining notice for his appearances in a series of British theater productions. An audition tape he had made for a casting director for a film that never happened ultimately put Garfield on his way toward a role in "Lions for Lambs." Nearly all of his scenes as an arrogant American college student are back-and-forth conversations with Robert Redford, who also directed.
Not a bad way to make your film debut, and yet Garfield still finds a way to make it a point of worry as to whether he is ready for the spotlight.
"I know where I want to get to within what I think I can do," he said, "and I don't feel anywhere near that yet.
