Running with Scissors

Running with Scissors is the $12 million Hollywood adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’s best-selling memoir of the same name. Burroughs’s memories of growing up in the 1970s are portrayed by an A-list cast, including Alec Baldwin, Annette Bening, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Evan Rachel Wood. Newcomers Joseph Cross and Eden Prairie native Jack Kaeding play Burroughs as a teenager and six-year-old, respectively.

After the divorce of Burroughs’s parents—an alcoholic math professor played by Baldwin and a bipolar poet played by Bening—Burroughs is adopted by his mother’s shrink, Dr. Finch (Cox), who works out of the house he shares with his two daughters and his wife. In addition to observing Dr. Finch’s unorthodox practices, which include giving patients free samples of unknown prescription drugs and, during particularly boring sessions, relieving himself in his Masturbatorium next to his office, Burroughs encounters illicit homosexual and pedophiliac affairs, ramshackle housing, and chaotic, untraditional communal living.

Running with Scissors is Kaeding’s first feature film. Though he’s been modeling since he was four, the nine-year-old says what he really wants to do is act. He thought it was “real weird” to have everybody on set watching him act during filming, but says it was helpful to watch such big stars get into character and that he learned a lot from them.

The film, written and directed by Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy (and produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B), centers on Burroughs’s emotional coming-of-age story and less on the graphic depictions in the book. But, like the book, the film is at once heartbreaking and inspiring. It’s a twisted, real-life story with such eclectic and eccentric characters you won’t leave the theater with that stale, Hollywood-brainwashed feeling. Opens nationwide Oct. 27.

Read more about Jack Kaeding in “See Jack Run.”