The End of the Tour (2015)

The End of the Tour (2015)

I tend to avoid biopics. They, as movies, generally have to focus of melodramatic moments. It is very hard to get inside someone via a picture show. They are mostly about celebrity actors and music stars, and usually I could care less what their lives were like. If I like someone’s work I probably don’t want to watch some actor pretending to be them and  going through all the biopic stuff such as drinking/drugging, beating/being beat by an intimate, going up and falling down, etc.

I have never read David Foster Wallace. Before viewing the movie I had not seen or heard an interview of him. I was aware of him in the sort of pop media way. And of course aware of the dramatic ending of his young life. I entered the viewing of this movie as a direct innocent as far as his own words, mode of speech, and even what he looked like, so I can’t say what a Wallace reader or “fan” would think of the movie.

I found the movie completely engaging and it stimulated an interest in Wallace. It is in essence a conversation, an interview between the writer and David Lipsky who has been sent to do a profile of him for Rolling Stone magazine. They talk and talk and talk, and it is makes for my idea of great entertainment, conversation about ideas and the culture we find ourselves living in. The Wallace character, though the script and actor Jason Segel,  is a guy who kind of thinks like me in some ways and it was good to see that expressed in a movie.

I went into the movie with a positive feeling about movie star Jesse Eisenberg. I can’t think of a movie with him that I didn’t like. OK I bailed out of The Social Network (ha! A biopic), and never watched the superhero movie he’s in, whichever one that was.. So if a potential viewer can’t stand Jesse Eisenberg, whcih I can understand, they might not bother with this movie. And his cigarettes smoking was delightfully unconvincing.
Anyway, good movie.