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Directed by Terence Davies

The Neon Bible

1h 32m

Directed by Terence Davies • 1995 • United Kingdom, Spain
Starring Jacob Tierney, Drake Bell, Gena Rowlands

Terence Davies’s achingly bittersweet adaptation of the novel by John Kennedy Toole (written when the author was just sixteen years old) evokes the the American South of the 1940s, where the teenage David (Jacob Tierney) discovers a world beyond his abusive household and conservative religious community through his transformative relationship with his free-spirited singer aunt (the great Gena Rowlands). Though it marked the first of Davies’s films not explicitly inspired by his own childhood in Britain, THE NEON BIBLE bears the director’s unmistakable personal imprint as it circles around themes of memory, outsiderhood, and the transcendent power of art.

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