I’m Still Here is going to become a cult classic at some point, but right now, I can see this movie bombing pretty horribly. That’s not because it’s a bad film, but instead like most cult movies, it’s a hard film to summarize and sell to the general public so it’ll get lost in the crowd and take a minute to find it’s audience on DVD. It’s difficult to tell your friends to see a movie that’s one part Borat, one part Spinal Tap and one part a pensive documentary about the fake descent into complete what-the-fuckery of a moderately famous actor — there’s no section for movies like that in the Netflix queue. Yet, I’m going to tell you to go check this movie out. I’m going to tell you to do that because I think it takes a very specific combination of intellect and degenerate to appreciate what Joaquin Phoenix and director Casey Affleck were going for with this movie.

Essentially, this movie is the documentation of an Andy Kaufman like social experiment/prank, to see what would happen if a famous actor went full on, grow a wizard beard, rambling, batshit crazy and decided to become a rapper. Joaquim Phoenix (the wizard bearded actor in question) very publicly and spontaneously ditches his life long pursuit of acting to pursue rhyming and almost immediately becomes the butt of jokes by the entire entertainment world for two years, while his brother-in-law Casey Affleck films the whole thing.

If all of this had been entirely “real” this movie would be a great bit of behind the scenes schadenfreude, as you watch a dude squander his money while rapping horribly — if you’ve ever experienced Trustafarians rapping at a spoken word open mic in a college town, much of this movie will feel oddly familiar. But, because this movie is constructed (to what degree, has yet to be revealed) it becomes less mockery and more a very compelling and surreal narrative that you try to decipher and unravel as you watch it. It honestly, probably poses more questions about the nature of reality than Inception did.

The main question you find yourself asking is “who is in on the lie?” When Joaquin Phoenix goes to meet Diddy to ask him to produce his album, does Diddy know this is fake? Is Diddy’s reaction to Joaquin’s 50 Tyson-esque rhymes a performance or reality? Either scenario is equally plausible, Phoenix is famous enough to get an audience with Diddy, Diddy opportunistic enough to at least take a meeting with anyone remotely famous — the dude fucking rapped with Godzilla in a leather suit, ’nuff said. If the people in the movie are not all aware of the artifice of the situation, then this movie becomes less about how shitty of a rapper Phoenix is and becomes more of a Rorschach test for celebrities. Faced with a dude they think is spiraling into insanity and drug addiction how do they react? David Letterman (if not in on the joke) comes off as a dick of the highest order, while Edward James Olmos appears to be just as profound and fatherly in real life as he is in Battlestar Galactica. Hopefully, Affleck and Phoenix will never reveal exactly how the movie was made and who was in on it. Knowing specific details would only destroy the reality warping narrative of the piece.

As this whole thing was executed in the public eye, there’s a weird feedback loop that you have to take into account. Instead of this just being a fake documentary about a dude losing his shit in a vacuum, we have to wonder what effect the world’s perception of the events had on the performers while involved in this. After the infamous Letterman interview, you see Phoenix breakdown and ask “why did I do this?” I can’t help but wonder if that’s Phoenix in character as a failed rapper talking, or Phoenix the actor who conned people into believing he was an actor who became a shitty rapper, wondering if he hadn’t fucked his entire career in pursuit of an awesome prank.

Take all of that “there is no spoon” shit off the table, and you have a movie that’s actually laugh out loud funny at times and surprisingly not because of how bad dude manages to rap, and trust me it’s fucking awful. Most of the comedy come from Phoenix being a stoned, rambling, bummy dude who is libel to explode at his entourage at any minute. He basically plays the role of your friend who smokes way to much weed and does nothing his life, suddenly given a million dollar bank roll and an imperative to become a rapper.

In a way the whole film plays out like an episode of Made that MTV would never air. The episode where a grown ass man sits around in his home studio making some of the worse rap known to man while sniffing strippers assholes and then has Puffy tell him he’s kinda feeling two tracks out of pity. About the strippers’ assholes for a second. This is the point where I say, it takes a certain kind of person to really get the movie. It’s not just “oh that’s funny”, in the “he’s so fucked up, he’s fucking with prostitutes” way, or “what a weird kink” way like Sasha Baron Cohen would play the joke. The way that this is staged and shot, it feels like Affleck and Phoenix are the type of dudes who prior to making this movie, had actually discussed sniffing prostitute’s assholes — or women’s assholes in general. Maybe, that’s something that’s never occurred to you specifically, maybe you are the type of person who has thought about what kind of condiments are best for tossing a salad with, or maybe you’ve discussed what superhero you’d like to dress up and have sex as — the point being if you’re that type of person who has traversed the roads of theoretical (or practical) degeneracy of various sorts, there’s many a moment that become ridiculously funny.

That all said, Affleck has made a very compelling movie in documentary style that has some very beautiful shots in it along with discussion of asshole sniffing and a rousing speech by Edward James Olmos. It’s going to be hard for a movie with all of that to find an audience who really appreciates it, but I think if you’re reading this you are more than likely the type of cat who at the very least will find this weird experiment to be entertaining.

- Behold the Destroyer