Herald rating: * * *
Cast: Billy Crudup, Samantha Morton, Jack Black.
Director: Alison Maclean.
Rating: R18 (violence, drugs, sex, language).
Running time: 109 mins.
Screening: Now showing Rialto.
Review: Peter Calder
This road movie, dripping with hard drugs - and quite a lot more R18 material - is the first American theatrical
feature by one-time local talent Alison Maclean, who made the excellent body-in-the bathroom short Kitchen Sink and the rather muddled and disappointing Crush.
It might seem to hang on the coat-tails of Trainspotting or Drugstore Cowboy, but it has an unpretentious charm all its own.
This is thanks in large part to the goofy and likeable presence of Crudup in the title role. He is the film's Candide, a scruffy, stoned junkie whose name (abbreviated to FH, the H standing for "head") derives from his propensity for screwing up everything he touches.
The story, set in Iowa and Chicago in the 70s (get ready for some seriously twisted clothes), is based on a series of loosely connected short stories by Denis Johnson, and it betrays its prose roots in its rambling, conversational narrative style which skips about and frequently rewinds to fill in gaps.
But that adds to, rather than detracts from, the appeal of a film which is a series of riffs on a single theme.
Though no son of Jesus (the film's title comes from the line in Lou Reed's Heroin "When I'm rushing on my run/And I feel like Jesus' son") FH is consumed by a genuine metaphysical wonder; early on he fancies that "maybe living and dying are the same thing and maybe we turned them into two different things and that's why we feel so lost."
The supporting performances hold it up when it staggers. Black (John Cusack's slobbish offsider in High Fidelity) is hilarious as a pill-popping orderly in an emergency room and Holly Hunter, Denis Leary and Dennis Hopper all turn in neat cameos.
It loses pace in the final reel as Maclean works out how to deal with a happy ending, but for all its cheery profanity it is a shambling charmer, full of incidental pleasures.
