Fridae

Paul Dano has recently become one of those actors you see everywhere but can't really pinpoint to what he did as much as what others were doing to him. In his breakout role in There Will Be Blood he stood by and let Daniel Day Lewis chew the scenery teeth gnashing away. In Cowboys and Aliens his role was barely noticeable in the wider context of the film. So, in Being Flynn, arguably the biggest role of his career so far, it's no surprise apparently that he again becomes the foil to one of the largest than life actors working in American cinema: Robert De Niro.

De Niro and Dano are both Flynns in this movie, De Niro is the father Jonathan, and Dano is his son Nick. Nick is slacking along in life while with his pals while trying to become a writer when he hears about his long absent father Jonathan, who was doing time in prison for cashing bad checks and left Nick to fend for himself with his mother Jody (Julianne Moore). Jonathan is a self-proclaimed poet and promised to be the next Great American novelist, but he's pretty much a blowhard and a conman who makes a living out of driving his taxicab. Yes, De Niro driving a taxicab, where did we last hear that? Soon Jonathan loses his taxicab and is forced to sleep out in the open and the cold, and eventually finds himself at the homeless shelter that Nick is working in.

Arms wildly gesticulating and teeth a gnashing, De Niro leaps into the role with gusto and makes Jonathan a pitiful figure, one whose few charms cannot make up for his glaring status as one of those whom life has chosen every opportunity to take a dump on and who is not helped either by his severe amounts of self-delusion. Jonathan pretends to be the toughest guy on the block, regularly threatening those around him with a never-shown capacity for severe violence or indulging them in his rants about his potential greatness in the form of the great American novel that he has written but which the manuscript has been rejected by every conceivable major publisher in New York City (this was before Kindle, alas). There is little doubt that he loves his son, though it doesn't seem to be of much use given his all-round wastrelness. Paul Dano reveals himself to be a performer of quiet subtlety, improving on the 'straight man' role he specializes in to portray not a silent dissenter as much as one for whom writing becomes a way to be honest about things he's not in his daily life. Julianne Moore continues with another of the ravaged woman in distress portrayals that have mostly defined her mature career.

As Nick's girlfriend Denise, Olivia Thirlby falls towards the one-note in continuing to play the sort of quirky hipster dream girl role she inhabited in The Wackness, while Wes Studi and the ever-versatile Lily Taylor also turn in solid supporting roles.

Director and screenwriter Paul Weitz adapts Nick Flynn's own memoir with reasonable competence and pushing all the right buttons of emotional manipulation, but his screenplay is largely unremarkable except for its willingness to ensure that Jonathan stays a basket case and his differences with Nick ultimately irreconcilable. The band Badly Drawn Boy punctuates the soundtrack with the usual type of forgettable indie lo-fi folk pop that is the soundtrack of wannabe indie-cred movies like this. Being Flynn remains at the end of the day one of those movies that floats and thrives on one big gimmick: seeing one of America's best actors take the mickey out of the tough guy and psychopath roles he made famous and deconstruct them into the form of a blowhard con artist for whom denial is probably his best defense from the vicissitudes of fate and chance.