The movie is directed, confidently if a tad too slickly, by Sam Taylor-Johnson, and anchored by her husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson, in a soul-and-body baring lead performance as James Frey, a crack addict, alcoholic and all-around disaster who gets packed off to a rehabilitation clinic after falling from a balcony during a drug binge and busting up his face. The problem is that-as Random House figured out-once you strip away Frey's initial promise of a true story, you're left with something that feels like a petulant, boastful, and not very noteworthy variation of a story that plenty of films, documentary and fiction, have told before, but with more insight or panache. As innumerable classic films from "Young Mr. Lincoln" and " Dillinger" through " Nixon" and " The Irishman" have proved, a story needn't be verifiable to offer truth of some sort (or illumination, or provocation, or just excitement).
This film adaptation treats Frey's book simply as a story, not questioning or even acknowledging challenges to its truthfulness, but rendering it with poker-faced reverence. It wasn't even possible to locate a police mug shot of Frey, despite claims in the book that he'd been arrested for a variety of crimes, some of them outrageous. The publisher ended up recanting their description of Frey's book as a true story, and offered refunds to readers who felt deceived. It became an object of scandal in 2006 after The Smoking Gun website revealed that a lot of the dramatic and/or salacious details recounted in Frey's supposedly true story couldn't be corroborated, including a tragedy that had Rosebud-like significance to the main character. Frey's source book was originally published by Random House as a memoir in 2003 and championed by Oprah Winfrey on her televised book club.
To be more precise, the movie's story felt too familiar in the way that timeworn showbiz cliches feel too familiar. I must've blocked the real-life details of writer James Frey's professional scandal out of my mind, because it wasn't until a half-hour into the movie version of his drug rehab book "A Million Little Pieces" that I started to question why, if this story was true, it felt fake.
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