Review of Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018) by Jayden P — 06 Sep 2018

I didn't know anything about this movie going in other than what the poster looked like. It was mostly the cast list that interested me. This made it an interesting experience when I figured out a half hour in that it was a biopic, based entirely upon the structure of the movie. It starts in the present day and then flashes back to the past. Later in the movie we find out that Joaquin Phoenix is supposed to be in his early twenties in that first flashback, but we're not told it at the time so I thought he was much older than that. We find out at the beginning that Phoenix plays a cartoonist, so I thought he was a cartoonist from the beginning but then he becomes one halfway through. There is little actual cohesive plot, it feels like a series of loosely connected events rather than a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Unfortunately it feels like the filmmakers fell into the trap of getting so familiar with this true story that they forgot the audience might not know anything about it. It reminds me of Chappaquiddick in that way, it's competently directed and well acted, but if you're not going into the viewing with some existing knowledge of the subject matter it is going to wind up a confusing mess. It's just the events of a person's life, lacking any sense of real progression.

Everything seems to come easy to the protagonist, he meets two sexy nurses who are instantly charmed by him, the ghost of his mother tells him to stop drinking and then he does with seemingly little struggle, he starts to draw comedic cartoons and finds immediate success. The movie briefly touches on some people being offended by his work, but then quickly brushes that off as angry assholes, rather than addressing that the subject of the film might have produced some problematic work. Jonah Hill and Joaquin Phoenix do some nice work here though, and some of the camera work is pretty good. It's competently made but watching it is a bit of a confusing mess.