An uninteresting film about an interesting man

The cartoon which gives this film its title is as close as you can get to an insight into its subject. The single-panel features a cowboy posse staring down at an overturned wheelchair in the desert with the sheriff uttering the line of dialogue that has been co-opted here as the title of this John Callahan biography.

It makes you laugh and then feel bad for laughing. As such it’s a perfect example of the dark, often shocking, humour of John Callahan, a quadriplegic alcoholic whose rage and bitterness poured out onto the page in his crudely eloquent work. Sadly none of this comes out in a film which plays like a Hallmark TV movie about someone bravely overcoming a physical challenge.

This story was a long-cherished project by the late Robin Williams who was a huge fan of Callahan and had teamed with director Gus Van Sant to try to get this off the ground in the Nineties. Williams would surely have brought some of his own mania to the part; instead we have an insipid performance from Joaquin Phoenix and directing from Van Sant who just seems grateful to be making the film at all.

Much of the story is told in a non-linear fashion as we hear Callahan’s story from a series of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He became a drunk as a teenager and then, at the age of 21, he was almost completely paralysed in a car crash. The accident happened after a two-day bender – Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix) wasn’t driving but his fellow bar-hopper Dexter (Jack Black) was. Dexter walked away with barely a scratch; Callahan became a quadriplegic.

The film charts Callahan’s story using the AA twelve-step programme as a framework. This tends to suck the drama out of the story and while there are some decent individual moments there is a general failure to cohere into a sustainable narrative. There are a range of fellow recoverees but they are cookie cutter characters spouting predictable homilies. His therapist/girlfriend (Rooney Mara) is particularly risible.

Some of the better scenes involve an almost unrecognisable Jonah Hill (top right) as his sponsor and one of the few people to challenge Callahan. Hill is the best thing in the movie but there is a sort of doomed certainty to the whole thing.

Callahan’s lived experience must have been dramatic but there is no sense of that here. His epiphany on the road to sobriety is very low-key and his emergence as a cartoonist seems to be incidental. It’s visually interesting, as you would expect from a director of Gus Van Sant’s calibre, but it’s hard to be engaged by it.

Phoenix seems determined to be liked, as Van Sant seems determined that Callahan be likable, and at times it’s a very indulgent process. By all account Callahan, who died in 2010 just short of his 50th birthday, was a difficult man but there is very little sense of that here.

If the film had just a fraction of the emotion and intensity of Callahan’s work it would be a much more satisfying watch.