Billy, 15, seems like an ordinary geeky teenager, the sort that every high school has, that everybody recognises from films like Napoleon Dynamite, Wayne's World and Bill and Ted.
He wants to be a rock star and plays electric guitar in his bedroom along to Kiss records. He's into horror movies and martial arts. He rides his pushbike around his small town wearing mirror shades and too-short shorts and fantasising about being a superhero.
But Billy is also highly intelligent. He talks about his violent, alcoholic, drug-addict father, who abandoned the family, with amazing maturity and openness.
'I'm always at war with myself, not just because of depression but because of my past,' he says, eyes darting backwards and forwards. Billy once threatened his father with a steak knife for abusing his mother.
Is Billy just an adolescent trying to understand the adult world in his own way? Or is he a disturbed, damaged youth, who needs professional help before he completely loses his grip on reality?
During the course of filming, an unusual real-life romance unfolds unexpectedly. Billy is attracted to Heather, a partially sighted waitress at the local diner. He seems drawn to a person who is, like him, not 'normal'.
Billy's mother talks about the problems - doctors telling her that Billy would be institutionalised from an early age; his temper tantrums (he once broke her nose); the constant monitoring by worried people in the town (she gets a phone call to warn her that Billy has borrowed a book from the library about serial killers) and her own guilt for letting Billy see his father smoking crack.
She tries to supervise his relationship with Heather and then consoles him when it goes wrong. What keeps her going is the assessment by schoolteachers who told her Billy was borderline genius when he was kindergarten age.
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