Affleck: I'm Still Here (2010)

I’m Still Here is Casey Affleck’s notorious film about Joaquin Phoenix’s attempt to build a career in gangsta rap, and leave full-time acting behind. Since it was released in 2010, it’s been alternately discredited and praised for the way in which it played with documentary conventions, effectively tricking the mainstream media into believing a totally or at least largely fictionalised version of Phoenix’s story. However, some four years later, it feels more as if Affleck is seguing mockumentary into reality television more than creating a documentary or mockumentary per se, and offering up reality television itself as a genre that effectively defies irony as a critical response, or at least a genre in which irony and sincerity are largely indiscernible. Specifically, it feels like an intensification – parody is perhaps not the quite right word – of the bromantic brand of reality television pioneered by Jersey Shore, which was really starting to gain traction around this time, as Affleck and Phoenix stumble through a world populated almost exclusively by straight white men, fumbling their way from one depraved post-frat party to another, while trying to figure out a way to get Puff Daddy involved in their gangsta rap label. What gives that a bit more of an edge is the way in which it intersects with Phoenix’s washed-up persona and lifestyle, which alternates between a kind of 60s hippie vibe, driven by one psychedelic freestyle after another – it’s the shortest of steps to Inherent Vice – and a more contemporary idiom, with Affleck’s exquisitely modulated mise-en-scene sketching out one gentrified mumblecore nightmare after another, a series of bleary bachelor pads permanently stained with early dawn light, populated by a coterie of hipsters who seem to have forgotten to self-cultivate since they hitched their wagon to Phoenix’s star. In other word, a milieu that promises to totally anonymise and absorb Phoenix but that in fact casts him back into the very spotlight he’s trying to avoid, just as all his efforts at self-destruction and self-annihilation – sinking into a miasma of drink, drugs and dick shots, making ludicrous career choices, wasting money in increasingly bizarre ways, releasing a terrible hit single – collapse the reality he's searching for back into reality television, which thrives on the kinds of fringe genius, vision and rapturous self-realisation he displays here, in a kind of late revival of Errol Morris’ apocalyptic Americana. How much of it is played for laughs is finally hard to say, even after the fact, since the more Phoenix becomes a talking-point around which the Hollywood media exercise and exhaust their powers of parody, irony and reflexive distance, the more his post-ironic posture and slouch seems to irradiate something untouchable, a sense of “no spectacle left to hope for, no fantasy left to imagine” that defies all but the most exquisitely lyrical treatment and appreciation. 

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