“Hurt people hurt people,” so the saying goes, and nowhere is that sentiment more deliberately chewed over than in the new memoir-turned-movie, The Adderall Diaries. Like its name sounds, The Adderall Diaries only amounts to be a scattered and disjointed series of high-strung story lines and emotions, not feeling so much individually distinguished as it does overly stuffed.
Based on the best-selling memoir by Stephen Elliott, meta celebrity James Franco plays the aforementioned author, a hotshot young New York novelist (who just happens to have the same cool guy look and swagger of a Franco type, right down to the trademark scruffy facial hair and leather jacket). Franco gets to indulge all of his persona’s pleasures here, seeing our main character Stephen writing pages of prose (the film uses cuts of typed passages from the memoir to further blend book-to-movie adaptation) on his laptop in his swanky New York high-rise apartment, signing books at book signings and reading passages at book readings, and generally, living the good life.
With life seemingly worry-free, and needing to decide a next book project to pursue (much to the pressure from his manager, played by Cynthia Nixon), Stephen decides to attend a court hearing of a father (Christian Slater) accused of abusing his kids murdering his wife, making Stephen reflect on his own intensely traumatic and abused past, which is when his world come crashing down. Or, no – it’s when he meets an attractive young writer in Lana Edmond (Amber Heard) who shares a similarly troubled childhood as an also-victim of abuse (and who also has dark and mysterious body tattoos as a result of it). Wait, no – it’s when his father, Neil Elliott (Ed Harris), the man Stephen holds responsible for abusing and neglecting him, comes into town, does it all come crashing down. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s a mish-mash of things going on here that all kind of start and stop in a herky-jerky way.
Perhaps in The Adderall Diaries‘ original memoir form, the many number of Stephen’s side-stories might have woven together in a lighter, more graceful way, rather than feeling as equally competing against each other as they do here. To its credit, the film does attempt to stitch scenes together with a degree of dreamlike qualities and synthy-spaciousness to illicit this lyrical feeling, its sonic space similar to 2014’s novel-to-movie, White Bird in a Blizzard. But the forced accumulation of all these things – including a bout of writer’s block that relapses Elliott into taking adderall and pills again – feel’s like a relentless downpour of self-pity and vanity.
The writing and directing effort here from Pamela Romanowsky (2012’s The Color of Time) feels contrived, and so submissive to Franco’s star power that it ultimately buckles under artificiality. For any, and certainly, for all of this to stick, Elliott the character needs to be a man we can truly know, and whose vulnerability can be felt and understood by all. Franco’s leather jacket, bad boy with daddy issues character, doesn’t so much create the character from the book as it does get absorbed into his own persona.
The Adderall Diaries posits spurts of a larger, more interesting idea – that being the connection of memory, and who we think we are and who we see others as from the recollection of past experiences. The movie’s further exploration into broken pasts and the people trying to reconcile that with their present situations is something that should’ve offered a much more universal feeling of catharsis and understanding, rather than with a heavy helping of self-pitying and brooding. Interestingly, the real-life Stephen Elliott even felt the need to explain the differences between his actual life and writing after having seen The Adderall Diaries, which can only speak to the fact that sometimes, full justice might not be served in the pursuit of claiming “artistic liberties.”
105 min. Rated R for language throughout, drug use, sexuality, and some aberrant and disturbing content. ‘The Adderall Diaries’ is currently available exclusively on DirecTV; It will be released theatrically and available on all other digital and cable VOD platforms starting Friday, April 15.
