Joaquin Phoenix In "I’m Still Here": Real Deal, Or Stacked Deck?

Is this film for real? Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here purports to be an up-close look at the year-long crackup of his brother-in-law, Joaquin Phoenix. The documentary – if that’s what it is – begins in the fall of 2008, with Phoenix announcing his retirement from acting (“I don’t want to play this character of Joaquin anymore”) in order to pursue a musical career as a rapper. As we soon realize, after witnessing his eccentric efforts along these lines, this is a daft idea.

But then that is the idea: Phoenix, who played a mentally unstable character in his last movie, Two Lovers, is supposedly losing his mind for real here. We watch him growing fat and ratty. We see him puffing joints, hoovering cocaine (at one point he snorts a whole rock up his nose) and cavorting with naked call girls he’s hired off the Internet. We see him weirding out in his famously disastrous appearance on the Letterman show, and vomiting at length after falling off the stage during his calamitous rap debut at a Las Vegas nightclub.

Throughout all of this, Phoenix stalks Sean “Diddy” Combs around the country in a desperate effort to persuade the hip-hop mogul to produce an album he wants to make. At their first meeting, Combs explains to the wannabe rapper that making records costs a lot of money – not least for his own participation. This could only be news to Phoenix, and he’s dismayed: Having trashed his Hollywood career, he’s now so short of cash (we’re asked to believe, of a man who’s been paid millions per movie) that he’s been reduced to traveling by van rather than limo, and may soon lose his house in L.A. At their next meeting, in a recording studio, Phoenix plays some homemade demo tracks, and we can tell from the stony look on Combs’ face that this is an album with which he’ll be having nothing to do. (Combs, of course, played an even funnier version of himself in Get Him to the Greek.)

By now, the whole world is laughing at Joaquin Phoenix, and we see him huddled in misery as the media mockery comes gushing out of his TV. At the same time, though, there’s an instant suspicion among cynical observers that this outlandish freak show – which is being documented by Affleck with a crew of no less than four camera operators – is a stunt, a hoax, yet another mockumentary-in-the-making. Is this in fact what’s going on?

I think so. The signs of it seem to be everywhere. Would the star’s sister, Summer Phoenix, really have stood by while her husband chronicled her brother’s mental implosion if it were real? Would Affleck himself stand by filming in silence as a disgruntled employee snuck into his friend’s bedroom to take a dump on his head as he slept? Would the famously controlling Sean Combs really allow anyone into his hotel room with an unannounced camera team? Would Phoenix not be knocking back the customary complement of booze along with all the coke he ingests? (Since in real life – in real real life – he’s a recovering alcoholic, maybe that was a no-go.) And finally, would Affleck himself be so coy in interviews about what this picture really is, if it really were what we’re intended to believe? (Worth noting: He and Phoenix are credited as the picture’s writers and producers.)

What we have here, I think, is another exercise in the comedy of discomfort, that squirmy genre inaugurated by Allen Funt on his old Candid Camera shows, honed to a demented edge by the late Andy Kaufman, and developed to unpleasant perfection by Sacha Baron Cohen. But no civilians – no Kazakh peasants or homegrown yokels -- were degraded in the making of this film. Its only target is its star – and if he turns out to be the movie’s motivating hoax-master, fans of vérité humiliation may feel cheated.    

The rest of us are left with two possible interpretations of this film. Maybe Joaquin Phoenix really has lost it, and maybe he’ll never resurface from the depths into which we see him sinking at the movie’s conclusion. Or, he’s simply turned his back on the Hollywood star-making machinery (he’s done that before) in favor of commenting on it with this sometimes fascinating and often very funny pseudo-documentary. In that case, on the evidence of this film, he’s still a pretty great actor. And he’s still here.