Gabriel (Dermot Murphy) is a young drummer in a garage band in Ireland. His lifestyle and playing are spiraling out of control because he's secretly just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and he very reluctantly seeks help for this after his sister and bandmates stage an intervention. After his therapist then encourages him to become more physically active, he decides to play a soccer game at a local home for teens with disabilities. That's where he meets Christopher (Jacob McCarthy), who has Asperger's syndrome. He's the soccer team's goalkeeper and dreams of one day playing professionally; he also loves Lego and maintaining order and routine. That inevitably clashes with Gabriel's hell-raising ways, and it doesn't help that Gabriel quite openly feels ambivalent, even mocking, towards Christopher and his fellow residents. In the truest coming-of-age movie sense, though, they gradually bond and understand each other, before taking a road trip.
On paper, The Drummer and the Keeper should have slapped a beaming smile right across my face, what with my own Asperger's and my frequent love of teen/YA stories and films. But quite honestly, I found it increasingly unrealistic, unimaginative and boring. Writer-director Nick Kelly apparently has a son on the autism spectrum and also hired the advocacy group Aspire as consultants, but does that show? Not for me. It gets as many things wrong about both of these conditions as it gets right. Christopher values predictability and structure, hates being touched, talks in quite technical language and has a twitchy nervousness; those are all very common Aspie traits. But otherwise he's an utter cliche, particularly in how he focuses obsessively on toys and flagrantly disregards personal space. Now, I'm no authority on bipolar but its portrayal here also doesn't ring true for me; it's known to deliver swings between clear euphoria and deep despair. Gabriel has the occasional depressed episode but otherwise appears neutrally serious. I just could not buy any of that, and while McCarthy (who's not autistic) does a fair job of navigating Christopher's mind and heart, Murphy barely registers.
The narrative itself also deliberately invokes too many conventions, I think, and the soundtrack brings absolutely no life or poignancy to it. Regarding coming-of-age movies about mental illness, It's Kind of a Funny Story and The Perks of Being a Wallflower both run The Drummer and the Keeper over with a steamroller. It's no "keeper" for me.
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