A thoughtful drama spun out of celebrity journalism’s essential insanity
“I don’t want to appear in Rolling Stone as somebody who wants to be in Rolling Stone,” the celebrated author moans to the Rolling Stone interviewer he’s invited into his home.
This conversational equivalent of an M.C. Escher painting is par for the course in The End of the Tour. It’s a movie that makes thoughtful drama out of the essential insanity of celebrity journalism, wherein a star proclaims humility while a scribbler promises idolatry.
The star author is the late David Foster Wallace, played to a passiveaggressive “T” by Jason Segel. The scribbler is Rolling Stone’s David Lipsky, played by Jesse Eisenberg at his fidgety best, who at the time of this 1996-set story was endeavouring to make a recluse seem like a rock star.
The exchange happened over five days while Wallace was concluding his promotional duties for Infinite Jest, the totemic novel that cemented his reputation as an astringent wit and brilliant critic of modern contradictions.
(Wallace would have hooted at the “humble brag” of social media.)
Infinite Jest’s many inventions include a film so entertaining, it’s like Monty Python’s “Killer Joke”: those exposed to it end up literally amused to death.
The End of the Tourisn’t that kind of movie. It’s more of a conversation between two fierce intellects, both claiming to be searching for some kind of objective truth while at the same time fiercely attempting to massage and manage their public images.
As they get to know each other, on the road and inside Wallace’s messy abode near Bloomington, Ill., they call each other out on their BS.
“I treasure my regular guy-ness,” Wallace insists, adding that he wears his familiar bandana to stop sweat, not to appear like an eccentric hipster.
“You don’t crack open a 1,000-page book because you heard the author is a regular guy. You do it because he’s brilliant,” counters Lipsky, who craves the popular acclaim that Wallace treats so lightly.
Director James Ponsoldt ( The Spectacular Now) and screenwriter Donald Margulies drill deep into the insecurity and aloneness behind the bluster.
It’s a movie steeped in grey skies and melancholy, all the more so knowing that whatever demons were bedevilling Wallace in 1996 probably contributed to the unshakable depression that led to his 2008 suicide.
There’s a feeling of claustrophobia that doesn’t lift even when the two venture out on the highway to yet another book-signing event, past an endless stream of strip malls and fast-food joints.
A Minneapolis tour stop, where a perky Joan Cusack points out the site of Mary Tyler Moore’s famous hat toss, offers a welcome comic interlude.
What The End of the Tour gets right more than anything is the loneliness
What the film gets right more than anything is the loneliness of being a writer, and the absurdity of trying to find inspiration from a blank screen
of being a writer, and the absurdity of trying to find inspiration from a blank screen or profundity from a narcissist.
Wallace nails it with this observation: “I don’t think writers are smarter than other people. I think they are maybe more compelling in their stupidity.”