James White opens with its titular protagonist trying his best to shut out the world. Hiding behind headphones, he leaves a club still hazy from whatever he’d consumed the night before. Nodding off in the cab, he wakes with a start. “That was fast,” he says, but really it was no faster than usual. He’d just disappeared into himself for awhile. But he can’t stay there forever.
The film never strays far from James’ side, which often isn’t a pleasant place to be. Played by Christopher Abbott, best known as Charlie on Girls (though this should change that), James is a self-pitying, self-destructive jerk who lashes out with violence whenever things don’t go his away. And sometimes he lashes out violently just for the hell of it, as in an early scene in which he helps defuse, then inflame, a barroom scuffle. He has, in his mind at least, good reasons to behave like he does: The father who abandoned him recently died. Not long before, James helped nurse his mother Gail (Cynthia Nixon, also extraordinary) through a bout with cancer. He deserves, in his own words, “a break,” despite not really having anything in his life — a job, a relationship, or even an apartment — from which to take a break. But when he tells Gail he absolutely has to go to Mexico to get his head together, promising, “When I come back, I will be ready for life,” she sends him on his way. He’s a guy who’s always gotten what he’s wanted and still been left wanting more.
This is writer/director Josh Mond’s first feature, but he comes to it with a long list of producing credits as part of the Borderline Films collective, a group of likeminded filmmakers whose output includes Antonio Campas’ Afterschool and Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene. James White take a similar approach to that latter film. It lingers uncomfortably and uses tight close-ups and shallow focus to make its subjects feel isolated even from those closest to them. But what seems clinical at first becomes incredibly emotional as the film progresses and James’ life changes — even if James himself does little to change it.
In Mexico, James receives a teary call from Gail telling him the cancer has not only recurred, it’s spread. Returning to New York, his days become defined alternately by caring for his mother and trying to obliterate all memory of her illness via endless nights clubbing, drugging, and drinking. Scott Mescudi, who records under the name Kid Cudi, plays James’ best friend, Nick. Mond, who drew on his own experiences for the film, has cited Mescudi’s music as a source of inspiration, and that’s not hard to imagine. Both James White and the Kid Cudi album Man on the Moon: The End of Day are works about the sort of pain and loneliness so deep that all the sex, drugs, and loud music in the world can’t push it away.
As Gail’s condition worsens, James White becomes the drama of a son caring for, and reconciling with, a mother he knows he’s disappointed, and one whose condition occasionally causes her to lose touch with reality. If that sounds like a contrived set-up, it plays out as anything but. Both Abbott and Nixon treat the material naturalistic, playing out scenes of illness and resentment in a book-lined apartment that’s scene many such dramas over the years. When Gail takes a turn and has to be hospitalized, the panic that sets in as James realizes he’ll have to actively fight to make sure even her basic needs are met is the panic of everyone who has had their illusions of hospitals being places run by urgency and compassion rather than overburdened pragmatism shattered.
There are countless films in which an emergency forces an arrested-development case to grow up. This isn’t one of them, really. James is at his best when caring for his mother, but a disaster when he’s not, and little in the film suggests that will change, up to a final scene that confirms it as an open question. And ultimately James White is less about who James will become than who he is in that moment — a selfish, foolish, deeply emotional young man staring down an unthinkable loss that will leave him without the one person in his life who’s kept him moored. In the film’s most powerful scene, one that compares favorably to Brian Cox’s “we drive West” monologue in The 25th Hour, James calms his mother with a vision of a shared future he knows will never come. But he can imagine it, and in that moment it’s enough — even if what’s to come will wash it away.
