Jesus' Son

...the story is patently stupid. "Jesus' Son" (a misnomer), is a bunch of meaningless vignettes sort of strung together into a kind of wandering odyssey of a guy who's wide-eyed and stupid (Crudup). The problem with this non-story is it's not compelling nor evocative nor poignant nor interesting nor educational nor prosaic nor entertaining nor...etc. It's, well, just plain dumb. I was deluded by some good reviews (Ebert and others) and watched waiting for something interesting to happen. Unfortunately, nothing interesting did happen. No big climax, no great ending, no apocalypse, no epiphany, no nothing, nada..zip. Just dumb boredom heaped upon more dumb boredom. Good fodder for dilettantes but not recommended for anyone else.

Billy Crudup shows us again that he's not afraid to work in a wide-variety of roles, and in 'small' movies. In "Jesus' Son", he plays a low-life, clueless, heroin addict named Fuckhead. I don't think you'll see Leonardo, Tom, or any of the other young, A-list actors coming close to roles like this. The film is placed in the early 1970s and follows Crudup through a few years of his heroin-addled life. Narrated by Fuckhead, he chronicles his own life from his introduction to heroin, through his attempts to quit. The narrative moves backwards and forwards in time, almost as if Fuckhead is remembering something out of sequence which might interest the viewer. Definitely not for everyone, but in my opinion is a very interesting movie.

JESUS' SON (2000) **1/2 Billy Crudup, Samantha Morton, Denis Leary, Holly Hunter, Jack Black, Greg Germann, Dennis Hopper, Will Patton. Big-screen adaptation of Denis Johnson's collection of stories centering on oddball junkie and anti-hero Fuck Head (Crudup in a fine display of acting) whose odyssey of despair and significant frustration correlates with his unique relationships with its cast of strong character acting and hazy gleam cast by director Alison MacLean. A quasi blend of `Drugstore Cowboy' and `My Own Private Idaho' with a bent perspective of a drug-fueled world bleakly attempting to clean itself for a better good. A bit too much in spurts but has its distinct charm largely thanks to the acting and memorable black out sequences (FYI: that's author Johnson as an emergency room patient with a hunting knife jutting from his eye). Not exactly subtle but not forgettable either.

I was totally disarmed by this wonderful movie! Most movies about drug addiction hit you over the head with the misery and destruction of the users. Yet this movie was about so much more--a whole host of characters marching to a different beat. This movie told it's tale in short snippets...I almost felt like I was eavesdropping or spying on the characters at various moments in their lives. Nice balance of lightheartedness and seriousness. Some truly great lines. When a nurse tells FH his girlfriend is comfortable now. He asks with total naivete: "Is she dead?" I see that others here have problems with the title and the reference to Jesus. Not me. Aren't all of us (and esecially the world's "losers") just Christ figures waiting for redemption. It made me think of the line, the meek shall inherit the earth. The mystical touches, whether drug induced or not, were wonderful.

Beautiful, humane film filled with menagerie of "off-the-wall" (sorry) supporting characters. This film succeeds where all other "drug films" fail. It doesn't cram a message down your throat. It's not concerned with retreading the territory of "Trainspotting" or its clones. It has similar scenes, but the tone is completely different. Billy Crudup also delivers his real star-making performance (this came out before "Almost Famous") as a young man whose name begins with an 'F' and ends with an 'uckhead'. His rambling narrative makes this film seem more like a friendly anecdote than a wittier-than-thou voice-over which always seems to do more to flatten out a film than to expand it. This film uses drugs as a vehicle to show how all of us need some sort of redemption, but we have to get it on our own terms.