Back to Back 37 - I'm Gonna Try to Nullify my Life

Comparing drug-addled tragicomedies from the American heartland

Jesus' Son (1999) - director Alison Maclean, co-writers Oren Moverman, Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia
Spun (2002) - director Jonas Åkerlund, co-writers Will de los Santos, Creighton Vero

Genre: Punkish Tragicomedies centred on drug-users aka Trainspotting-like

When I'm RUSH!-ing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus' son
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

"Heroin" Velvet Underground

You don't have to like drugs to like drug movies. It's enough to like the idea of drugs, their breakaway power to cast you adrift from the everyday world, the false but oh so powerful romantic allure of being an outsider, a wanderer on the plains of chemically-induced questing for the Holy Grail of being high. In fact some of the best drug-inspired fiction has been created by those who either never did any drugs at all, or did drugs for a short time but then quit, reasserting their own autonomy over the slow domination of a habit that comes, quickly or slowly, to become the greatest thing in one's life. The only thing.

It's that totalizing power to become a complete dominator, the habit and synecdoche of life, that it shares with a mystical religious ecstasy, a political ideology of absolute committment, or a limit experience of extreme sexual perversion. But arguably the drug trip makes better cinema than all these others (though all have of course been visualized in film).

Jesus' Son is an ensemble film with loose episodic structure featuring the outcasts of American society, and a bitter and dark comedy-drama that has a surprising amount of heart beyond its hard exterior. The film is adapted from Denis Johnson's magnificent story collection of the same name, by turns funny and tragic, which depicts the lives of a number of junkies from the mid-West in the 1970s. Johnson's tales in turn were inspired by Isaac Babel's great combination of lyrical wistfulness and terrifying violence Red Cavalry, which followed a troop of Cossacks and their dweebish intellectual staff officer on rampage through the East European "bloodlands" of Ukraine and Poland.

It might be hard at first sight to make the link between an amok horde of Soviet cavalry and the misadventures of a tatterdemalion group of MidWestern junkies, barflies and squatters, but if you squint enough or maybe do enough drugs you can see the connection. It's above all the disruption to the settled world. Just as a plundering army might sweep into a country of sedate farmland and make it hell, so might a troop of heroin-seeking scavengers swoop in on a house and strip its copper fixtures out, leaving it an utter wreck. They are doing the same to themselves.

Above all it's the approach to storytelling that informs both Red Cavalry, possibly the greatest single collection of tales ever written, and Johnson's Jesus' Son. Like Joyce's Dubliners, and many a short story anthology since, it builds on the idea of an epiphany, where a single tableau-like action or image-assembly - the mise-en-scène as it's known in film - can give rise to a feeling or idea which is much more powerful than any combination of words or dialogue.

It's the imagist conception of meaning from a scene rather than meaning from words. If this can be transferred to the cinema screen, as it was pretty solidly by Danny Boyle in the druggy tragicomedy Trainspotting (1996), then a number of powerful emotions can be conveyed to the viewer. Everyone remembers in Boyle's film the horrified approach of Ewan McGregor's Renton to the cot of the neglected baby, though most of us have blanked out what he saw inside. That is for a whole generation perhaps the single most powerful image of drug addiction and its consequences.

There are almost no women in Red Cavalry, or even in the written version of Jesus' Son, but the writers of Alison Maclean's film version have made the relationship between the male and female leads the narrative and emotional core of the story. Billy Crudup is warm and charismatic as the gentle heroin addict known as Fuck Head through whose eyes all the experiences occur, but even this great performance is upstaged by the incredible Samantha Morton, whose combination of decisive strength and vulnerability also became the central emotional anchor of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008).

Other supporting roles by Denis Leary, Jack Black at his demented best, Holly Hunter, Michael Shannon and Dennis Hopper are all top-rank performances. Character actors Greg Germann and Yvette Mercedes kill in a central scene. Truly, the gang's all here, and the direction and script are up to the mark. It's an absolute crime that this wonder of American literature and indie film is not better known. What happened? I know 1999 was a strong year for film, but even so Jesus' Son deserves so much more acclaim than it received.

This is a solid recommendation for a comic, touching and strangely beautiful piece of grungy Americana. One sequence in particular, combining horror with stoner farce of the highest standard, deserves to have all the fame in the world. If you've seen the film, you know the one I mean. If you've read the stories but haven't seen the film, you can almost certainly guess what I'm talking about here. And if you haven't either read the book or seen the film, then what are you waiting for? Get on it right away. I'll wait here and gaze at the MidWestern sunset thinking sweet melancholy thoughts while you're about it.

— INTERMISSION —

A wild ride through the bleak but highly comic uplands of speedfreaks, outcasts and buzzed bumbling cops. It's what you would get if you married the stylistic excess and panache of Requiem for a Dream (2000) to the irreverent and ironic slacker sensibility of Clerks (1994), but on the way to the wedding stopped in for one last fling with the scuzzy filthiness of Gummo (1997). And talking of Aronofsky, it has a turn by Mickey Rourke which prefigures The Wrestler (2008) to a surprising degree, as if the drug cook of Spun and the down-on-his-luck wrestler were actually the same guy in different phases of life.

Now there's a considerable amount of artistic licence here with regard to the effects of speed on the long-term tweaker: pupils do not constrict to the size of pinpricks, and users don't tend to hallucinate comic-strip-style fantasies; but other observations are spot on, such as the sudden onset of paranoia and its just-as-sudden passing, or the melting of days together so 3 or 4 or 5 days all appear like one continuous day.

Editing tricks like smash cuts and disturbing cross-fades do a convincing job of recreating the effects of a days-long tweak. The hideous squalor of one place is authentic enough, though it must be said that some users go the other way, investing their crank-energy into tidying their homes obsessively.

It's an ensemble effort, but centred on three characters especially: Ross the slacker user (Jason Schwartzman), who strikes up a friendship with Nikki (Brittany Murphy), girlfriend to The Cook (Rourke), who supplies the local area with speed cooked up in his motel-room drug lab. The Cook is the still centre of this spinning world, as he produces the drug that all the others depend on, and only moves from his bubbling stove-top to consume porn at the local adult shop and resupply with ephedrine pills at the local garage.

He soon hires Ross to be his driver, which is good for Ross in one way, as he gets a steady supply of speed and regular contact with his new crush Nikki, but rather bad in another way, as he tends rather to neglect his present squeeze, pole dancer Amy (Chloe Hunter), in ways that are described as "not what a regular guy would do" by Nikki, and what more normal folk would describe as atrocious torture worthy of serious jail time.

Other planets orbiting around The Cook include Spider the dealer (John Leguizamo), his chick Cookie (Mena Suvari), the dealer's client Frisbee (Patrick Fugit), Liberace-like senior kingpin 'The Man' (Eric Roberts), and a pair of ridiculously incompetent and brutal cops who are bumbling around trying to get on reality TV by busting some low-level drug guys (Peter Stormare and Alexis Arquette). All Cops Are Bumblers.

If that's not enough there are numerous cameos by rock legends like Bob Corgan, Rob Halford and Debbie Harry. So it's a full deck of cards and everyone is playing the joker. But the highlight has to be Brittany Murphy, whose charisma is stratospheric and whose lines tend to be the funniest. Her character carries the film and if you fail to develop a love for her the movie will fail (and you have demonstrated yourself unworthy - for who doesn’t love Brittany every moment she’s onscreen?)

It's deeply dark comedy about the most marginal of people in the American urban outback, but nobody who enjoyed the goings-on in Pulp Fiction (1994) would find anything here too objectionable. And beyond the outrageous antics there actually is a human heart beating, especially as the central trio reveal their vulnerabilities. Though it's doubtful that many viewers will feel too much sympathy for Ross after his grotesque treatment of the poor stripper in his life. Many might feel the outrage has tipped them over into downright hatred of him.

So if you've completed these instructions you've now seen Billy Crudup, Samantha Morton, Holly Hunter, Jack White, Michael Shannon, Dennis Leary, Dennis Hopper, Britanny Murphy, Jason Schwartzman, Mickey Rourke, Debbie Harry, Mena Suvari, Bob Corgan, John Leguizamo, Peter Stormare and Eric Roberts all giving some of their greatest perfomances, all in one day. What a tale of sleazy Americana is there, oh brothers and sisters! Who could resist its tawdry beauty?