If you've never seen East of Eden or Rebel Without a Cause or Giant; and if you know and care nothing about James Dean; and if you'd rather look at Abercrombie & Fitch ads than watch a movie; and if you like to daydream that all beautiful men are gay; and if you like gazing at James Preston; and if a line like "It was as if I had seen in black and white my entire life and suddenly I saw in color" (in an excruciatingly solemn movie that switches between black and white and color) sends you into ecstasies of intellectual bliss, then this is the movie for you.
If you HAVE seen the real James Dean in ANY movie, then you cannot for one second accept this milky crap as anything but one very stupid man's wet dream. Matthew Mishory should be slapped silly for wasting fantastic cinematography on this silly, stupid, pretentious movie.
I admit that James Preston is fabulously beautiful, and if this movie hadn't even pretended to be about James Dean, then I could have gazed in drooling stupor at him in every frame. But his transcendent gorgeousness is one reason he makes an absolutely terrible James Dean. Dean looked and acted more like James Franco than like James Preston.
The other reason Preston makes an absolutely terrible James Dean is that he's a smug, self-satisfied, talentless wimp, gorgeous on the outside with nothing but marshmallows inside. Dean was raw, vulnerable, fascinating, unstable and dangerous as a lit firecracker, not at all the cool, smug, calculating opportunist Mishory makes him here because it's all Preston's acting ability allows.
The only wise move Mishory made was not letting Preston try to recreate even one second of any performance Dean ever gave. The only glimpse of Dean "acting" we see is him jumping over a table in acting class.
The James Dean of this movie is like the real James Dean in only one way: he's short.
