I’m Still Here (2010)

I initially felt that I should give our bottom-of-the-barrel one-star rating to Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here, his directorial debut about pathetic brother-in-law Joaquin Phoenix. To rate it any higher, I reasoned, would only encourage the curious public to spend money on tickets to see it, which would subsequently be interpreted by Mr. Phoenix as appreciation for his supposed talent and encouragement for his sociopathic behavior. But I think this movie may actually have a modicum of value as an object lesson–perhaps as an educational video for rehab clinics.

After opening with a couple of old home video clips reminding us how Joaquin was once part of a family of child performers–late brother River is never mentioned in the film, but one can’t help think of his drug-induced death while watching what follows–we first see present-day “J.P.” in his backyard in the Hollywood Hills. He’s brooding to Casey about how much he hates acting now, being told where to stand, what lines to say, what costume to wear. He says that there’s no creativity or art in being an actor, and as an occasional actor myself, I take umbrage at that remark.

Congratulations, J.P., you just managed to shit in the face of every actor you’ve ever worked with, many of whom still seem to admire your work, judging by the warm embraces you received at your all-star staged reading for charity. (I apologize for the graphically excremental phrase, but Joaquin uses it a lot in this film and, in one audience-pleasing moment, literally gets it back from someone else.) It’s at this event that he tells an entertainment reporter he’s retiring from acting, setting off a media frenzy.

J.P. whines that he’s tired of “playing the part of Joaquin Phoenix” and wants to be his own source for artistic creation. Unfortunately, he wants to be a hip-hop rapper for his artistic outlet, and even non-fans of the genre will immediately realize that he sucks at this. He has little to no sense of rhythm, his delivery is monotone and expressionless, and his mumbling enunciation is so unclear that one can only make out the occasional word like “spotlight,” “paparazzi,” and the one that ends nearly every line, “bitch.” He’s so bad that when he finally corners hip-hop mogul Sean “P. Puff Diddy Daddy Whatever I Wanna Be Called This Week” Combs in a recording studio and plays his crappy home-recorded demo, Combs actually seems to take offense and asks Phoenix if it’s a joke. Phoenix is crestfallen and deeply hurt when Combs finally tells him he’s not going to produce J.P.’s album.

Many have wondered aloud if Joaquin is making an elaborate put-on a la Andy Kaufman or Sasha Baron Cohen. After watching this movie, I don’t believe it’s a prank: Joaquin Phoenix is truly a deluded man who is wasting his life (as he himself declares in an emotional outburst following his infamous appearance on David Letterman’s show).

It’s frankly shocking to see Phoenix openly smoking pot, snorting coke, and paying for prostitutes; even more so to see how he has bought into his own hype. He thinks that because he’s famous and acclaimed in one creative field, he will automatically be successful and respected in a different endeavor, regardless of whether he has any actual talent for it. And as much as he wants to shun his acting career, he obviously still wants to be famous.

But perhaps the worst thing on display here is how much he’s enabled in his delusions by his sycophantic entourage. Joaquin’s agent, publicist, and friend Edward James Olmos all give him the “are you sure you want to do this” talk, but they all treat him with kid gloves. J.P. has a couple of friends–one a guitarist from a failed rock band who he met while “jamming”–as live-in personal assistants, and they receive a terrible amount of verbal abuse from Phoenix. One is blamed for failing to make a connection with Sean Combs, when it’s obvious that Combs and his own assistant are keeping their distance. In one emotionally appalling moment, Phoenix slurringly deprecates an assistant that he has no “bit,” while the superior J.P. has the “acting bit” and the “music bit.”

And what’s especially galling is how these friends, these assistants, these enablers, take his psychosis and rambling abuse, because they’re losers riding him as a meal ticket. This is never more clearly illustrated than at the film’s climactic nadir, when Phoenix headlines a Miami nightclub, picks a fight with an audience member, leaps off the stage and throws punches, and is dragged out by three bouncers. When they get back to his hotel room, his one remaining PA says, “Good show,” trying to sound sincere as the pouting Phoenix slams the door in his face.

So I give an extra half-star for the work of Casey Affleck here; he’s still a fine actor (and I revere his extraordinary performance in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), and he manages to capture a lot of amazingly intimate moments with his subject. As a fellow actor (with a “bit”) and a family relation, Phoenix sees him as a kindred soul. And if I was this close to a train wreck, I’d focus cameras on it, too.

Affleck puts together a pretty cohesive portrait from what he has to work with, but he’s really as much of an enabler as anyone who is that close to Joaquin Phoenix and doesn’t tell him he’s a disheveled, antisocial asshole. He raps, “I’m still here,” but beyond his shades and beard, he can’t see that his audience isn’t still there.