JESUS' SON (Lions Gate) Starring: Billy Crudup, Samantha Morton, Denis Leary, Jack Black, Holly Hunter. Screenplay: Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia and Oren Moverman, based on the book by Denis Johnson. Producers: Elizabeth Cuthrell, Lydia Dean Pilcher and David Urrutia. Director: Alison Maclean. MPAA Rating: R (drug use, profanity, brief nudity, sexual situations) Running Time: 108 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
JESUS' SON is a film about addiction -- only it's not, really. The way we're used to seeing films about addiction, there's a message, a lesson, an agenda. Drugs are bad, the effects of drugs on users and their immediate circle of acquaintances are worse, and our hero would be a perfectly happy and productive member of society if not for that thing he wouldn't just say no to. These tend to be films in which the ostensible messed-up protagonist isn't really the center of the film. It's the needle that's the center of the film, or the bottle, or the rolled-up $100 bill. Addiction isn't just the theme; it's the star.
So let's re-phrase that introduction: JESUS' SON is a film about FH (Billy Crudup) -- short for F***head -- a man who eventually becomes an addict. He's no angel even before his addiction, however, a loner who stumbles one day in the early 1970s into a party where he meets Michelle (Samantha Morton). It's Michelle who eventually introduces him to the wonderful world of heroin, and the two find themselves in a tumultuous relationship over the space of a few years. Along the way, FH has himself some crazy misadventures: helping a drunken pal (Denis Leary) tear up a house for scrap wire; sharing emergency room ordeals with a pill-popping orderly (Jack Black); and so on. Then Michelle leaves him, setting him down the difficult road to sobriety.
Actually, Michelle has already left him when JESUS' SON begins, which is typical of the frisky, zig-zagging approach taken in adapting Denis Johnson's collection of short stories. FH narrates his story with all the straight-ahead narrative lucidity you'd expect of a perpetually stoned guy; he riccochets back and forth in time, picking up one thread of the story in the middle of another story when he recalls something he's forgotten to tell us. Director Alison Maclean and her trio of writers give JESUS' SON a playfulness that's entertaining even as it never shies away from the darkest sides of addiction. In one scene, a romantic song plays while the camera tracks slowly toward a motel room bed, to reveal not a lovers' embrace, but FH helping Michelle fix; in another, a split screen reveals the alternate fates of two characters who have both taken the same bad drugs. It's a film with the wonderfully scrambled logic of drug use itself.
But in case you missed the caveat, this is not exactly a film about addiction. Billy Crudup gives a magnetic performance as FH, a peripatetic loser who has been given that derogatory nickname even before he ever picks up a needle. In fact, his mutually self-destructive relationship with Michelle is portrayed as a strangely stabilizing influence in his fragmented life. Crudup finds a cohesiveness to FH's character through the episodic film, and even manages to keep up with Jack Black's scene-stealing orderly in the film's most hilarious segments. JESUS' SON works not because the individual scenes are so effective (though they are) or because the portrayal of addiction is so grimly affecting (because it is not), but because FH is a great anchor for a film that heads in so many different directions.
Perhaps inevitably, JESUS' SON eventually turns to the subject of FH's attempts to get straight, and it's a bit depressing that the film loses so much steam once drugs are no longer involved. The individual moments -- FH's fascination with a Menonite woman, a conversation with an aging fellow patient in rehab (Dennis Hopper), a relationship with a member of his support group (Holly Hunter) -- feel more isolated, and it begins to appear that there's no end in sight. Perhaps the come-down is relative after such a wonderful first hour; perhaps there's nothing for an episodic film to do but find a somewhat arbitrary place to stop. Even the sluggish conclusion can't diminish the surprising, darkly comic experience of JESUS' SON, however. Even once FH is clean, there are still problems for him to deal with. How refreshing to see addiction take a back seat to the addict, to see the needle in its appropriate place as supporting player.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 son rises: 8.
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