Critic Reviews

Cooper seizes control of the movie when he’s onscreen, but the two young leads are also enormously appealing.

Despite its missteps, Coming Through the Rye is a sweet and inviting road trip.

Special praise goes to Alex Wolff as Jamie and Stefania Owen as his sympathetic, agreeable girlfriend Dee Dee, and veteran actor Chris Cooper makes a complex but astonishingly convincing cameo as the great Jerome David Salinger himself. I went to Coming Through the Rye expecting nothing and left feeling enriched, enlightened and warm all over.

Coming Through the Rye may be the closest we’ll ever get cinematically to the novel. And in being so far away from it, it’s close enough.

As Salinger, the formidable Chris Cooper has a brief but masterly turn, sympathetically rendering the writer as a curmudgeon defending his literary offspring.

Sadwith, whose TV credits include the miniseries “Sinatra,” conjures a few memorable moments in his big-screen debut. But the most stirring moment belongs to Cooper, who turns a barely audible, exasperated sigh into a complicated life story.

It’s not a perfect film...but it’s one that resonates for anyone who’s ever been touched by a book, movie, painting, or song and had their world shift into something it wasn’t before.

Writer/director James Steven Sadwith’s autobiographical coming-of-age film doesn’t have a lot of originality to it, in spite of the nearly-unique nature of his youthful encounter with the Great Writer. But Cooper’s turn gives it weight and life.

Regardless of its capable performances and understated direction, and no matter that it was inspired by Sadwith’s own hunt for Salinger, Coming Through the Rye comes across as a cute conceit incapable of sustaining a substantial feature.

Ironically, the phoniness that iconic teen romantic Holden Caulfield despised pervades Jim Sadwith’s Coming through the Rye, a semi-autobiographical tale of hero worship and literary integrity.