Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, the latest from director Gus Van Sant, doesn’t quite work. As a biopic, it’s serviceable. As a weighty drama, it’s hackneyed. For a quirky, dark comedy, it’s largely enjoyable. Taken as an entire piece, it’s a tonally inconsistent mess that never quite coalesces into something potent. But along the way, there are enough moments that hit just right for it to not be a waste of time.
Based on the autobiography of the same name, the film chronicles the life of disabled cartoonist John Callahan. Van Sant adapted the script himself, choosing to chop up the chapters of Callahan’s history into a non-linear collage of formative moments, traumatic events and tragicomic slice-of-life interludes. Outside of expecting the audience to buy Joaquin Phoenix as Callahan from age 20 onward, this is the film’s biggest mistake, as it becomes increasingly difficult to tell certain time periods apart, with whole sequences being strange enough in tone to seem like they might just be figments of Callahan’s imagination. Setting those structural issues aside, however, there’s still a lot to chew on.
Phoenix plays Callahan with his usual oddball sincerity, imbuing a character who isn’t the easiest to like with the requisite humanity necessary for making his story engaging. Callahan was an alcoholic from the time he was 13 until well into adulthood whose drinking led to a car accident that left him a paraplegic. He struggles with his disability, with his upbringing as an orphan who never knew his birth mother and with his rampant addiction, until he meets an AA support group led by an eccentric, gay, rich shaman named Donnie, played by Jonah Hill.
Unsurprisingly, the scenes surrounding the support group are far and away the film’s best. Hill holds court over several ragtag supporting players from Udo Kier and Mark Webber to musicians like Beth Ditto and Kim Gordon, They make for an irreverent, genuinely funny family who push each other and help one another work through their trauma and baggage. If the film solely focused on this period of Callahan’s life and recovery, it would be a crowd pleaser with some serious heart.
But there’s still a weird, manic-pixie-dream-girl subplot with Callahan and his love interest Annu (played by Rooney Mara as some kind of mirror universe Lisbeth Salander) and the American Splendor-lite shenanigans casually exploring Callahan’s actual cartoons without truly digging into his creative voice. When you also throw in the more overwrought elements of the narrative, like the boring third acts beats punctuated by Danny Elfman’s insufferable score, it feels like several uninteresting films duking it out with one that could actually have some power.
Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot works best when it’s taking an unadorned look at a hard life while still finding the dark humor that helped Callahan find his life’s purpose. It’s a charming tale that treats heady subject matter with a relatable touch. It just gets too bogged down by clunky editing, uneven screenwriting and other cloying drawbacks that seem to be the new normal for late period Van Sant, who feels like he’s doing an unfunny impression of his Finding Forrester days. At least the cast is killer and there’s enough to love to make the awards bait awkwardness easier to swallow.
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