Jacobson is skilled with his small cast and mostly leaves to the imagination the outcome of a number of gruesome sequences. Wisely, Jacobson depicts only three of Dahmer’s victims, including his first, a high school wrestler (Matt Newton) he lures into his mother’s home while she is away. The incident in which one of Dahmer’s victims escaped his clutches, thus bringing about his downfall, is not dramatized, and why Dahmer zeroed in mainly on Asian, Hispanic and African men remains unexplored.
The trouble is that Rodney comes across as the fictionalized character he is, and the culmination of this sequence is altogether too contrived. Rodney manages to find something appealing in Dahmer, even though he considers him weird. Warm, outgoing, direct, funny and endearing, Rodney is everything that the calculating, secretive Jeffrey is not. The heart of the film is like a two-character play (unfolding in an obvious set) involving Dahmer and one of his pickups, the slight, charismatic Rodney (Artel Kayaru). His mother, who remarried and moved to California, is a cipher here, and his father (Bruce Davison), who subsequently wrote a book trying to come to terms with his son’s fate, comes across as insensitive, authoritarian and slow to comprehend that his son is seriously disturbed. The film does not mention, for example, that he had a childhood history of cruelty to animals. The film continually shifts between past and present, not a bad idea, except that the flashbacks sketchily suggest that Dahmer’s troubles began to surface when his upper-middle-class parents divorced when he was 18 when they clearly started much earlier. (Still, it would have said something of the world Dahmer lived in had Jacobson included that after returning the youth to Dahmer, the officers joked that they would have to go back to the police station to get deloused.) Jacobson stages this horrifying sequence without any heavy-handed underlining.
The women disagree strongly, but the dismissive officers view the incident as a gay lovers’ spat. Two police officers appear, followed by Dahmer, who smoothly convinces them that the kid is merely drunk. Wandering the streets wearing only his undershorts and trying to find help, he is spotted by two young women who try to help him. It re-creates the notorious incident in which a drugged and injured Laotian youth (Dion Basco), 14, managed to escape from Dahmer’s apartment.
“Dahmer” is at its best at its beginning. This becomes a hindrance to building suspense in telling a true story whose outcome is already well known (Dahmer was murdered at age 34 in 1994 by a fellow inmate while serving a 957-year prison sentence for 17 murders). “Dahmer” moves with a slowness that’s meant to be compelling but is largely merely glum.
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