The disc: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

The details: The first film Rawson Marshall Thurber directed was the raucous, hilarious Dodgeball. The second is the measured, extremely serious The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, from the novel by Michael Chabon.

Go figure.

Dodgeball made a lot of money and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh has been rushed to video after a bare nod to movie theaters, but it’s worth seeing, if for entirely different reasons than Dodgeball.

Mainly, it’s worth seeing for Peter Sarsgaard, who plays the requisite bad boy who’s shacked up with the requisite bad girl (Sienna Miller), each of them seemingly haunted by a terrible weight. The two of them form bookends for a rather excessively bland young man (Jon Foster) who comes of age during the movie. Reduced to its essence, it’s basically Sophie’s Choice without the Holocaust, and Thurber treats the material with some of the same undue reverence that marked the Styron novel.

Sarsgaard has a bland, doughy, undistinguished face, but he’s a true chameleon, and he adopts a insinuating, slightly whiny voice for Cleveland and a rakish beard. Cleveland is slightly scary, even to himself, and Sarsgaard is the best thing in the film, which also features Nick Nolte as Foster’s gangster father.