TRAPPER’S DELIGHT; Joaquin Phoenix. IMAGE: Magnolia Pictures

Casey Affleck’s new portrait of Joaquin Phoenix, I’m Still Here—the more apt title I’m Not There was already claimed—observes a public disintegration that turns a smoldering Hollywood heartthrob into a Zach Galifianakis character. Which is to say that it sort of explains why Phoenix grew that weird beard and attempted a rap career. “I really want it to be a hip-hop Bohemian Rhapsody kind of thing,” Phoenix informs a bewildered Mos Def about his effort—and it’s some kind of bohemian thing, all right. Phoenix becomes a practitioner of the heretofore underappreciated Fat Slurring White Guy school of rap.

So what is this? Is it a documentary? An art-school jape? Well, that was the question throughout Phoenix’s display—which started with the proclamation that he was quitting acting and culminated with a baffling, nearly catatonic appearance on Letterman—and it remains an open riddle throughout much of this movie. There are two obvious options: Either Phoenix is taking an elaborate piss on the entertainment complex, or Casey Affleck harbors profound resentments against his brother-in-law. I’m Still Here is a portrait of the artist as a differently enabled buffoon. Gibbering and ranting, an unleashed id that can’t operate the push bar on a door, Phoenix spends months musing on the disappearance of bees and the buttholes of prostitutes, before finally revealing to Sean “Diddy” Combs his magnum opus: an off-key track called (here I’m guessing, but it’s nearly the only lyric), “Compli-fucking-cation.” Fairly early in the film, I scribbled in my notes: It’s not real. There’s just no way. On the other hand, I had to concede, he was smoking hella dope.

But hoax and breakdown aren’t really the sole possibilities, even if they’re the only ones digestible in celebrity-gossip culture. What Phoenix is delivering here isn’t “real,” but neither is it merely a prank. It’s an actual performance—and an extremely perilous one. “My artistic output so far, if I’m honest with myself, has been fucking fraudulent,” Phoenix mutters at the movie’s outset, but this isn’t true: Look back over his career from Gus Van Sant’s To Die For through James Gray’s Two Lovers, and you see an actor who has always been drawn to the psychologically fraught. In Affleck’s film, he allows himself to drop off that edge. I’ve had friends who’ve drifted in and out of mental illness while indulging their artistic dreams, and the resultant squalor looked much like this. Maybe that’s why, much to my own surprise, I found myself more admiring of Phoenix’s dedication than annoyed by his disheveled exhibitionism.

By the time it reaches its unexpectedly affecting conclusion, I’m Still Here has begun to feel a lot like the antisocial outbursts of Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers—but the society Phoenix is feverishly rejecting is one of marketing hype and voyeuristic vultures. “The future of documentary is lies,” Korine waggishly told me at a Portland screening of his picture earlier this year, but here Phoenix is fully submerged into a kind of mad truth. He’s committed.

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