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Like Father, Like Son

Poverty. Drugs. Addiction. Dysfunction. Homelessness. Suicide. If none of this sounds good to you, stop reading. "Being Flynn", directed by Paul Weitz ("About a Boy"), is that delightful combination of gritty grimness that some filmmakers find compelling, but is actually just unpleasant. Ugh.

Nick Flynn (Paul Dano, "There Will Be Blood") is kind of a loser. He aspires to be a writer, but is the type to mooch off a girlfriend and then philander when she's not around. To say he has daddy issues is a massive understatement. His father, Jonathan (Robert DeNiro), left him and his mother (Julianne Moore) and it was up to her to raise him alone. In letters to his son, Jonathan proclaims himself one of the greatest writers of all time - which of course makes Nick (who seems to suffer writers block for much of the film) feel entirely inadequate.

Nick is a young man, living with roommates in an abandoned nightclub, when Jonathan, newly evicted, calls out of the blue to ask for help moving. Stunned, Nick meets the man for the first time... and just as quickly as he came into his life, Jonathan is gone again. That is, until he turns up at the homeless shelter Nick is working at. Awkward...

Here we watch as Jonathan begins a slow spiral down through desperation and mental illness. He rants. He raves. He gets violent. And Robert De Niro does a good job with it, even if it is hard to really picture him as anything other than Robert De Niro. As he slides into this dark place, it becomes clear he's bringing Nick, who picks up a little addiction problem along the way, with him. Theirs is a predictably dysfunctional relationship - how could it be anything else? - but there's also a bit of masochism thrown in on both sides. Fun, right?

The screenplay, by the director, is based on the autobiographical "Another Bulls--t Night in Suck City" by Nick Flynn and the author did have an editorial hand in adapting it. And it shows. There's some great talent here, and if the actors have a hard time hitting their stride, it's partially because Mr. Weitz has treated the material too preciously. Mr. Dano, who I usually like, walks around in an almost constant state of wary bewilderment as if he's worried that really giving himself to the role will somehow damage the balance of the movie.

The big problem with this film is that neither Flynn gives you a good reason to care about them. The elder is annoying in that he won't shut up; the younger is annoying in his whininess. While redemption of a sort comes at the end, mostly it's all just depressing. The best thing "Being Flynn" has to offer is that it will make you happy you're neither one of them.