Joaquin Phoenix & Antony Langdon  in the movie I'm Still Here

The wince-worthy Joaquin Phoenix meltdown "I'm Still Here" is either all bull, no bull or partly bull. It could be a largely fabricated home movie, based on real events, or it could be more or less as "real" as it fakes out to be.

On the other hand: Phoenix's father, who appears briefly on screen in the film, is played by someone with the last name of Affleck, possibly (probably?) the father of the director, co-writer and co-producer, Casey Affleck. Like Phoenix, Affleck -- who is Phoenix's brother-in-law -- can be a scarifyingly exposed performer on screen. "I'm Still Here" is going for maximum bad-behavior exposure, all of the time, fake or real or both. It's a celebrity-implosion horror movie, enough to make even the worst person in Hollywood, whoever that may be at this instant, think to himself: "At least I don't mistreat my personal assistant so heinously that he exacts revenge by defecating on me while I sleep, and while the camera's running." (Truth or fiction? No in-between on this bit!) Or, "at least I don't go on 'Letterman' and flame out the way Phoenix did in early 2009." Rarely has the question of a documentary's artifice mattered less. I genuinely hated this picture, almost as much as I've admired Phoenix's work in everything from "Gladiator" to "Walk the Line" and even the hackneyed but affecting "Two Lovers," after which Phoenix decided to retire from acting and devote himself, in between screwing around and being a self-immolating lout (if the movie's "true"), to a wing-and-a-delusional-prayer career as a rapper.

Much of "I'm Still Here," which felt like the slow-motion "Inception" universe's idea of 107 minutes, is taken up with Phoenix's attempts to get Sean Combs on board as album producer. Taken as a drug-addled, nicotine- and invective-stained travelogue, the film lurches from Hollywood to New York to Miami, as Phoenix reckons with his own rapper's limitations, his own outsize yet terrifyingly fragile ego, his own perpetual on-camera performance. It's "meta," you see. It's a video document of a man no longer interested in acting (though he speaks briefly of the occasional payoffs between the words "action" and "cut") who nonetheless may be acting every second, playing not a devil/angel version of himself, but a devil/worse devil.

The "Letterman" appearance is included in its entirety. The film verges on a two-hour "bonus extras" edition of that appearance. I hope Phoenix returns to his former profession, at least now and then. He's terrific. With "I'm Still Here," he and Affleck can now say they've gotten their self-indulgent, "searching" folly of a fakeumentary, or true-umentary, behind them, and how.

 

MPAA rating: NR (language, nudity and sexual material).

Running time: 1:47.

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix; Antony Langdon; Ben Stiller; Sean Combs; Edward James Olmos; Tim Affleck; Sue Patricola.

Credits: Directed by Casey Affleck; written by Phoenix and Affleck; produced by Phoenix, Affleck and Amanda White. A Magnolia Pictures release.

I'm Still Here Movie Review - Joaquin Phoenix & Antony Langdon