Synopsis
David Galucci is only sixteen. With his tousled auburn hair and baby-smooth skin, he is at that awkward, sensitive age where he is no longer a child yet far from being a man. Yet to look at David is to see that he is anything but a typical teen: his boyish good looks rest upon a ripped, hulking mass of a body. His obsession with working out is driven by his mother Juana, a renowned artist with her own dark agenda. Within their scarcely lit home where only slivers of sunlight are allowed in, David’s every move is mercilessly measured--every rep, every calorie, every centimeter is counted in pursuit of achieving his mother’s ultimate goal: having her son’s body reach absolute physical perfection before his seventeenth birthday.
And yet in spite of his ascetic home life, David yearns to be a typical teen, hanging with friends, checking out girls and going through all the experiences of life as an adolescent. Attending a posh prep school, he surrounds himself with a group of boys all clumsily fumbling into sexual maturity by way of crude jokes as David quietly wrestles with his own sexuality, pulled in different directions yet never given any clear guidance on what it is to be a man.
Outside of the worlds of home and school, David also spends countless hours at a grungy gym in the company of a motley assortment of bouncers, bodybuilders, and body obsessives, a pumped-up clique of hardcore gym rats caught in a cycle of one-upmanship and tense camaraderie. Wanting desperately to be like them, David falls deeper into their world, settling into a place where he might fit in but where temptations lurk around every dark corner.
With their deadline fast approaching, David and his mother both know his body still falls far short of perfection. Juana quickly demands growth at any cost but the human physique can only be pushed so far. Soon David’s gym cohorts offer the teen dangerous chemical shortcuts to achieving his goal, sending him spiraling down into a cycle of physical and emotional torment and leading to a violent, irreparable rupture with his schoolmates. Pushed and pulled in every direction by adults who only take and trapped inside a body that is growing to freakish proportions, David rages against this brutally imposed armor. An armor that defends nothing. And his only way out is to stop being perfect.