Based on Armistead Maupin’s novel of the same title, “The Night Listener” has Robin Williams play Gabriel Noone, a gay public radio storyteller who strikes up a telephone relationship with Pete (Rory Culkin), a 14-year-old boy.
Gabriel has written a soon-to-be-published memoir about a childhood of sexual abuse.
Gabriel comes to harbor suspicions about the boy’s circumstances with his adopted mother Donna (Toni Colette).
The distracted author meets with a series of surprises when he travels to the woman’s Midwest home to personally meet Pete.
The film’s over-leveraged plot imparts diminishing results as its predictable revelation arrives with an unsatisfying anticlimax.
Rated R. 82 mins.
