5 Second Review: I’m Still Here

Casey Affleck’s mockumentary I’m Still Here showcases Joaquin Phoenix’s career path not long after he was nominated for an Oscar for portraying Johnny Cash in Walk The Line.  He publically announces that he is quitting acting to pursue a career as a rapper.  Of course we now know that Phoenix was acting but not unlike a Sacha Baren Cohen film, no one else is in on the gag other than Affleck.  So part of the fun is watching him wind up exasperated agents and media personalities who take him to be serious.

The first forty minutes or so of this documentary is good fun.  We see Phoenix convincingly go off the edge and act like a complete fruitloop.  He crashes Hollywood parties, has an entertaining meeting with a bemused P.Diddy and his bizarre rants are pretty funny to watch.  For a while.

Unfortunately, it sort of goes south from there.  The documentary doesn’t really have much of a structure or a particularly complicated message to convey.  The second half devolves mostly into scenes of Phoenix yelling at his agent.  It all gets a bit repetitive and tedious.

I’d actually recommend watching Get Him To The Greek over this film.  Although purely fiction, it portrays the same anarchic debauched celebrity lifestyle you see here but is delivered within the confines of a more structured and ultimately more satisfying narrative.