Notes From Tribeca: The Adderall Diaries (2015)

Another of the films I liked at Tribeca FF, was a contemporary drama:   The Adderall Diaries, based on a  best-selling  memoir of the same name by Stephen Elliott, starring James Franco as the author, a young man battling his demons. 

Stephen is a bright, talented, narcissistic guy who takes too many drugs, engages in risky, masochistic sex, and blames his father Neil (Scott Glenn) and  everyone else but himself for his cascading personal and professional troubles. He is on a steep downward spiral. Elliott had made a name for himself by writing a confessional about his wild, strung out, screwed up life – all of which stemmed from the death of his mother and subsequent abandonment and emotional abuse by his cruel father, now deceased. Except it turns out that Dad isn’t deceased, and when he turns up, he’s got a different story to tell.   

Elliott has a new problem now: he’s got writer’s block. So, like Mailer and Capote before him, he turns to a splashy murder trial in the hope that writing about it may open the creative floodgates. It’s the notorious trial of Hans Reiser for the murder of his missing wife. Reiser (convincingly portrayed by a shorn Christian Slater), like Elliott, is a great finger pointer: at first he loudly proclaims his innocence, proclaiming that his wife simply abandoned the family, but once convicted he reverses course and acknowledges killing her but because he had to “protect the children” from their horrible mom. (The Reiser case arose in Oakland, CA, but it and the milieu of the entire story are transferred to New York City.)

The screenwriters – Elliott and first-time director Pamela Romanowsky – also add a fictional love interest for the movie, a pretty reporter (Amber Heard ) who happens to be covering the Reiser trial for the NY Times. Her relationship with Elliott is not totally believable, but does help us care for his mostly insufferable character – nothing like getting a little romance to get the empathy flowing. We also care because the Stephen Elliot character, however flawed, is charismatic, and because Franco is a terrific dramatic actor. So is Scott Glenn, who brings a wild intensity to his role as the maybe or maybe-not abusive parent.

Through the character of Stephen Elliott, this film raises interesting questions about subjective experience versus objective reality, about how we edit and conjure memories to fit the narrative we want or need to believe and express, how those self-justifying memories can in turn alter our perspectives and our understanding of  “truth”, and so how blaming and victim-hood can so easily become a barrier to understanding and responsibility.

I found The Adderall Diaries to be a very well made movie, and expect it will be successful. No idea when it will be released but keep an eye out.