Review: Permanent Midnight

"There are stories you don't want to tell, and there are stories that scald your brainpan right down to the tongue at the mere thought of uttering. But you can't NOT." These are the words Jerry Stahl wrote in his memoir Permanent Midnight; they are the words Ben Stiller as Jerry Stahl utters in the film adaptation of the same name. You could say these are the words that celebrities recovering from their addictions say when they write their journal of descent and survival and shop it around the television circuit. Ditto for all those talk show guests whose lives are so searing that they must out themselves on national television, or reveal that they slept with their father's hermaphrodite, transsexual, bisexual, fast-food waitress by day, dominatrix by night lover in front of an audience of whooping, IQ-challenged deadbeats.

The confession for your viewing pleasure is indeed Jerry Stahl's, a Los Angelian who lived high and survived dry in the excesses of the 1980's. A five-thousand a week writer shooting six grand up his arm, he coasted in Tinsel Town by penning scripts for shows like Alf (referred to as Mr. Chompers in the film) and Moonlighting (Cheryl Ladd puts in a brief appearance as a Cybill Shepherd-like actress). He has a bombshell English wife, Sandra (Elizabeth Hurley), who works in the business and whom he initially marries to facilitate her green card. Stahl wants them to be happy but he's married to the drugs. Starting with painkillers and graduating to hardcore heroin, nothing -- not even a drug-induced hallucination of Mr. Chompers beating down at his bathroom door or the birth of his baby daughter -- will dissuade him from the next fix.

Director David Veloz, who also adapted Stahl's memoir, tells Stahl's tale in episodic flashbacks as the now-recovered Stahl relates his dark descent to Kitty (Maria Bello), a fellow recovering junkie and beautiful loser in whom he finds salvation. Bello has a wonderful presence about her: she has a kittenish mouth, vulnerable eyes and the manner of a noir dame. When she tells Jerry that she's been through a lot, you believe her. Her presence validates the film's structure, which strikes one as too conventional and convenient. In lesser hands, Kitty would have come off as a composite, a character created to serve as a plot device.

There's a certain slightness to the film, which runs just shy of 90 minutes. They are not 90 tight minutes but Permanent Midnight contains a handful of nightmarish sequences. One has Stahl, recently enrolled in rehab, meeting up with Gus (Peter Greene), who introduces him to heroin. "Can't breathe," Stahl sputters as the buzz begins. Then the drug takes hold and, with Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" pounding in the background, he and Gus start banging themselves against the full-length windows. Did I fail to mention that they are in an empty office in a high-rise building? The scene is morbidly funny. You know these two could overdose at any second; they may even kill each other. But, hell, they're also two guys banging themselves against a window. You laugh as you cringe.

There are no laughs, however, in the film's most terrifying scene. Sandra begrudgingly leaves their infant daughter in his care. Stahl totes the baby along to a score and when Gus takes off with all his money, Stahl gets some drugs from an old friend. Sitting next to his baby daughter in the car, he pokes the needle into vein after vein until he finally has to strain his neck out and shoot up there. (At this point in the film, Stahl has already hit the nadir by locking himself in the hospital bathroom to shoot up while Sandra was in the delivery room. Lesson unlearned.) As the haze comes over him, he comforts the crying baby with a numb hand and slurred words. It's unbearable to watch.

Veloz should have taken more care in developing Stahl's relationship with Sandra, especially since Hurley creates a lovely portrait of a woman who loves so much that she believes every promise and forgives almost all transgressions. Pungent performances from Garofalo and Owen C. Wilson as Stahl's agent and friend, respectively, add to the film.

Stiller is on the mark. Seething with fear and loathing, he engraves a portrait of a man who needs drugs to walk the walk and talk the talk. At a story meeting, he rants rabidly about some expressionistic, surrealist musical interludes he wants to inject into the episode to the horror of the star and producer. As likable an actor and personality as Stiller is, he makes Stahl unapologetically hypocritical (he'll shoot up anything that comes his way but will only eat organic foods and insist on running five miles every morning: "I'm an L.A. junkie, I have to keep fit.") and reprehensible.

By the film's end, Stahl is on talk shows promoting his recovery. In Hollywood, there is a Hell worse than the one taught and imagined. Does he deserve it? Maybe, but it doesn't lessen the tragedy. "You might say that success ruined me," Stahl wrote. "You might say I ruined success."

Permanent Midnight

Directed by: David Veloz

Written by: David Veloz; based on the memoir by Jerry Stahl

Starring: Ben Stiller, Maria Bello, Elizabeth Hurley, Owen Wilson, Lourdes Benedicto, Janeane Garofalo, Fred Willard, Connie Nielsen, Liz Torres, Peter Greene, Cheryl Ladd, Sandra Oh