Logan Lerman acts with his shoulders: a boy trying not to be noticed, letting his guard down a fraction at a time. In The Perks of Being a Wallflower it moved us. Elsewhere the films have too often asked him only to stand still.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Logan Lerman does in the first ten minutes of The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012). Charlie sits in shop class with his shoulders up and his eyes down, and Lerman lets both come down a fraction at a time over the next hour and a half, so that by the time he is at a homecoming dance with friends you can measure how far he has come without anyone having said so. It is small work and it is his best. Stephen Chbosky, directing his own novel, hands him letters to read in voiceover that keep explaining what the face has already shown, and Lerman survives them by reading softly, as though he would rather not be doing it.
The tunnel scene got us, plainly and completely, and a good part of what got us was Lerman in the passenger seat, cut by Mary Jo Markey against Emma Watson standing in the back of the pickup with her arms out. He does almost nothing. His face simply opens. Ezra Miller has the louder part and takes the film, and Lerman lets him, which is a kind of generosity the shy-boy roles need and most young actors will not give.
He had been working a long time before that. Child parts from 2000, The Patriot among them, a good early notice in 3:10 to Yuma (2007), and then the Percy Jackson films (2010 to 2013), where he was a franchise lead at eighteen. The complaint that stuck in those years was that he was a blank, and we can see why: a face built for listening is not much use to a film that only wants it to run. After Perks came supporting work in Noah and Fury (both 2014), a lead in Indignation (2016), the series Hunters (2020 to 2023) and a part in Bullet Train (2022). Our own review of Bullet Train does not mention him, which is a fair summary of what that film asked of him.
Indignation, in which he plays Marcus Messner, drew the strongest reviews of his career. We have not reviewed it, so we will only say that an argumentative undergraduate is a shy boy with the shoulders finally down, and that he seems to have known what he was taking on: "I read the script and thought, 'How the hell am I going to do this?' Marcus is so much smarter than me." That is the right worry for an actor whose instinct is to withhold.
He is in his thirties now, and the parts that suited him best were about being seventeen. Somebody should give him a grown man who is trying not to be noticed, and then leave the camera on him.
Biography
Logan Wade Lerman (born 19 January 1992) is an American actor. He began appearing in commercials in the mid-1990s and made his feature film debut in The Patriot (2000).
Lerman appeared in the television series Jack & Bobby (2004–2005) and the films The Butterfly Effect (2004) and Hoot (2006). He gained further recognition for his roles in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010) and its sequel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), Noah (2014), Fury (2014) and Bullet Train (2022).
He has also starred in Indignation (2016) and returned to television in the series Hunters (2020–2023).
