https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqUa5sYHC9s
I have mixed feelings about seeing authors depicted on film. They spend their entire lives presenting to the world a nuanced window into their psyche, and then they die and some director turns them into a series of fashion trademarks and quirks. But hey, I still love Fear and Loathing and Infamous.
To Hunter S. Thompson’s cigarette holders and Truman Capote’s voice we can now add David Foster Wallace’s bandanna, worn here by Jason Segel in Spectacular Now director James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour, an adaptation of David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace, Lipsky’s account of tagging along with DFW for his Infinite Jest press tour.
Jesse Eisenberg plays Lipsky. The danger here would be turning David Foster Wallace into some never-ending spring of quips and other worldly wisdom, but it seems like they’ve done a fairly even job making him seem human. Using Jesse Eisenberg for contrast surely helps there.
It opens July 31st in limited release, and it’s currently tracking 94% on RottenTomatoes after its festival tour. Of course, take that with a grain of salt, because if a bunch of aspiring intellectuals don’t like a movie about David Foster Wallace driving around in a Volvo it’d have to be a f*cking disaster.