Memorable Men 2012 - John Hawkes - NYTimes.com In "The Sessions," John Hawkes plays a man who is disabled, but his performance puts the man first, the disability second. Hawkes is Mark O'Brien, the real-life poet and journalist struck with polio as a child who, as an adult in the late 1970s and early 1980s, wheeled himself around Berkeley on an electric gurney, when not living inside an iron lung. The body may be stilled, but it stirs, and so the film turns on O'Brien's efforts to enlist a sex surrogate, played by Helen Hunt. O'Brien had just three working body parts (foot, neck, jaw), and Hawkes's performance uses every bit of body that's available to him. His face and neck are in constant, expressive motion. His wrung-out, David Sedaris-ish voice wraps itself ringingly around O'Brien's poetry, charming his flummoxed surrogate. This performance isn't your typical, bag-of-tics Oscar grab: O'Brien is very funny, often lewd and only intermittently heroic. Explaining his conundrum to a sympathetic priest, he says: "My penis speaks to me, Father." His are big, recognizable desires, but they're locked inside a broken body. Perhaps the most impressive part of Hawkes's performance, which is so much about that body, is that he manages to take us into O'Brien's mind. There, we find a curious, spiritually restless human being, fully realized. Few actors could pull this off, and not every actor should attempt it. A star with the stature of a Hanks or a Penn, when playing a disabled person, often can't shake his celebrity aura. Here, Hawkes's relative anonymity is his greatest asset. We sort of know him - he was nominated for an Oscar in 2011 for his turn as the outlaw Teardrop in "Winter's Bone" - and he has often turned up as the slight, hangdog guy in fringe roles, playing characters crackling with violence. In "The Sessions," we see him transform into an unlikely leading man. The film is, at heart, a love story between patient and therapist, one that's consummated physically but not emotionally. We are as surprised as Hunt's character to be seduced by this immobile guy in the gaudy secondhand shirts. But how could we not be won over? As O'Brien, Hawkes vanquishes mawkishness, allowing dignity to surge.