My Friend Casey

<p>After moving from town to town Philip Nason and his family finally settle in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit. It's the summer of 1937 shortly after Philip turns eleven. A lonely child he inhabits a world of daydreams filling notebooks with his cartoon fantasies. He discovers he's unable to compete in the rough-and-tumble games that are a boy's rite of passage.</p> <p>Then Philip meets Jeremiah Casey-bigger older stronger better at games than everyone else but somehow isolated by his exceptional abilities. In Philip Casey finds a fellow dreamer and artist. Together they try to make an animated movie send cartoons to syndicates and finally produce a neighborhood newspaper. As they attempt to join the ranks of Al Capp and other famous cartoonists their aspirations conflict with the upheavals of sexual awakening the pressures of working-class life and the coming of World War II. The dreams of Philip survive but those of his older friend and hero do not.</p> <p><I>My Friend Casey</I> evokes a lost time and place and traces along a darkening landscape the path of what may have been the last surge of American optimism.</p>