It’s hard to gauge how much of what goes on here contributed to what later happened, as Dahmer was diagnosed with multiple disorders. Backderf (who, laudably, doesn’t cast himself in a flattering light) has said his story is about how Dahmer was failed by society, pretty confident that the guy was allowed to slip through the cracks via ignorance and negligence. Alex Wolff, as Derf - less a friend than an exploitative cheerleader - is effectively understated, and Anne Heche is entertainingly off-kilter as Dahmer’s unstable mother, Joyce. Ross Lynch is an unnerving Dahmer, sexually frustrated and awkwardly leering, with disconcertingly dead eyes. His home-life doesn’t help: he and his family live in a cabin in the woods, his loveless parents constantly bickering, and he soon begins acting up to get attention, notably faking seizures for laughs. After kicking off with some exposition - within two minutes Dahmer has ogled both a bit of roadkill and a young jogger, and his dad soon tells him he needs to be doing more ‘normal’ things than playing around with dead animals in the shed - it becomes a portrait of a young man fond of animal dismemberment, yes, but also burdened by repressed emotions and barely there social skills. Well let you know when this movie is showing again in London. It is resolutely ungrisly - 2002’s so-so Jeremy Renner biopic Dahmer explored all the cruising and killing, and this is a more analytical origin story. All My Friend Dahmer movie information and reviews. Set in smalltown Ohio during the months leading up to Dahmer’s first kill, writer-director Marc Meyers’ adaptation is a quiet study of dysfunction. After hearing of his very public conviction, ex-schoolmate John ‘Derf’ Backderf was suitably shocked, later writing and illustrating a graphic novel about the time they’d spent together in the ’70s: a nuanced portrait of a monster in waiting. Jeffrey Dahmer drugged, raped and killed 17 men between 19, often indulging in necrophilia and cannibalism along the way.