The lightest, sweetest movie at the multiplex right now is the one about the polio-stricken poet and writer confined 20+ hours of the day to an iron lung. In a departure from his villainous roles in "Winter's Bone" and "Martha Marcy May Marlene," John Hawkes plays the writer, Mark O'Brien, who after a rejected marriage proposal to one of the Berkeley coeds he employs as caregivers, decides to hire a sex therapist to experience physical intimacy with a woman. It turns out to be Hawkes' best work to date, a performance of abiding humanity, by turns smart, self-deprecating, naïve, almost schoolboyish.
