A Million Little Pieces, review: this addiction ‘memoir’ may be a pack of lies, but at least they’re stylishly told

Dir: Sam Taylor-Johnson. Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Juliette Lewis, Charlie Hunnam, Giovanni Ribisi, Odessa Young, Ryan Hurst. 15 cert, 113 min

James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces, which started life on the shelves as a self-help misery memoir and became a publishing phenomenon, wound up as an object lesson in the dangers of embellishment. Debunked on the Oprah Winfrey Show and elsewhere, this untrustworthy account of Frey’s time in a rehab clinic forced its author to make  apology after apology, almost to the point where a 12-step programme for literary fraud succeeded his original stint for drug and alcohol abuse.

A planned adaptation by Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go) was dropped, and a decade elapsed. Few directors would have seen the value of messing around with it ever again, but Sam Taylor-Johnson has plucked this book from the wreckage of its own reputation and given it a shot. Her film chiefly exists as a vehicle for her other half, Aaron, to dig down into the role of a self-destructive addict and show us what he’s capable of.

Several things rescue this from a slippery road to perdition as a potential vanity project. It was shot in a mere 20 days, on a $4m budget – you can compare the $25m spent on Beautiful Boy, another addiction saga, and decide which is the more wasteful. And the very nature of Frey’s fabrications is freeing to a filmmaker: there’s no need to stick to facts when they aren’t facts. The theme is the thing, and the Taylor-Johnsons – who co-wrote this script – want to show us the gruelling process of crawling out of hell, which is where we fittingly start.

The opening scene has James spinning out in a drug den, dancing solo, naked and out of his mind. The first frame recreates William Eggleston’s photograph of a bare lightbulb – one artist’s hat-tip to another – and the punchline is James’s tumble off a balcony, choreographed with a precision so perfect it’s funny. He regains consciousness, with broken teeth and shaking all over, on a flight to Minnesota, where his brother (a solid Charlie Hunnam) checks the clammy scarecrow into rehab – and here we essentially remain until he’s guided toward the light.

The film’s sincere core is threatened a little by its flashier directorial effects. Within moments of arriving, James imagines himself sliding – it becomes an elaborate dance routine – through a corridor of ordure. The fact that this was achieved practically, in a single take, doesn’t make it any less disruptive or jarring, at a moment in the film when we need to be tethered to rock bottom rather than witnessing such fancy footwork on either side of the camera.

When he’s allowed just to sit with James’s problems, enveloped in a black hole of withdrawal, the performance feels like Taylor-Johnson’s strongest to date. It’s riskily unsympathetic: he’s such an angry mess as to be more repellent than pitiable a lot of the time.

And the film’s strength is to glue us to him anyway, testing our empathy almost to breaking point. This is far from the syrupy, audience-coddling portrait that a higher-budget picture would almost certainly have inflicted on the material. The guerrilla energy of the production is, at least, the right idea: there are opportunities for lightning in a bottle here, even if not all of them are grasped.

Twitching up a storm, Giovanni Ribisi overdoes things as a gay addict and so-called “sexual ninja” whose desperate advances James has to sidestep; Juliette Lewis’s role as a staff psychologist is disappointingly forgettable compared with Dash Mihok’s as the pensive supervisor. Meanwhile, Billy Bob Thornton wheels in a cartload of wily wisdom as a mentor figure called Leonard – an erstwhile Mafia boss, in hiding after a bloody revenge mission, who’s given to wearing some highly eccentric outfits (a ridiculous onesie, and double white denim) which offset that Thorntonian deadpan rather well.

If the clinic comes to resemble as much a thespian boot-camp as a setting for recovery – and if the last image of said recovery, shot through a pint of whisky, has more rhetorical than emotional force – the better moments fight their way through, with both Taylor-Johnsons knuckling down to their thoroughly sober task.

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