I'm Still Here

City Paper Grade: B

by Sam Adams

Magnolia Pictures PHOENIX IN THE ASHES: I'm Still Here walks the line between fact and fiction.

[CITY PAPER GRADE: B ]

Since Joaquin Phoenix first announced he was giving up acting to devote himself to hip-hop, the suspicion has been that his hairpin career turn was part of an elaborate hoax, which is probably the most comforting frame within which to place Casey Affleck's maybe-sorta documentary. If it's not a put-on, then Affleck has captured his friend and brother-in-law amid a spectacular public meltdown, aided by what seems to be constant drug use and abetted by a crew of hangers-on who keep their jobs by never saying no.

After an opening montage that establishes Phoenix's post-Walk the Line high (and a home-movie prologue that sets up the contrived poetry of the movie's closing sequence), Affleck hits us with the image of Phoenix gone to seed, his paunch swollen, his face shrouded by a cloud of hair. Mercifully, he holds off for a bit on Phoenix's music, but when it does surface, it's predictably dreadful, mostly weed-slurred whining about the price of fame. Were Phoenix actually engaged in what he refers to as "a hip-hop 'Bohemian Rhapsody,'" there might be some nobility to his failure, but if this is self-expression, it seems he has precious little self to express.

A few scenes of debauchery, including one in which Phoenix snorts coke from between a prostitute's breasts, give I'm Still Here the flavor of an exposé, but the movie's ostensible subject remains a cipher. Either as documentary or as fiction, Phoenix's abrupt decision to stop playing "the character of Joaquin" doesn't scan, nor does his selection of hip-hop, a genre about which he seems to know next to nothing, as his venue of choice.

If he had set out to engineer his ignominious exit from the public eye, he could hardly have done better. But any argument that the film, or Phoenix's rap career, is a joke has to be backed up by a theory as to why he would undertake such a bizarre experiment in social engineering, especially one that has kept him away from his (former) profession for two years. If it's an act, then Phoenix is crazier than if it's for real.