Review: I’m Not Here Lacks Decisiveness But Is Perceptive About Alcoholism

Michelle Schumacher’s I’m Not Here is an odd mixture of the subtle, moving, and maudlin. Dramatizing isolated moments in an alcoholic’s life as he contemplates suicide, the film often sees characters exchanging dialogue so presentational that it feels surreal, with period signifiers (mostly from the 1960s through the ’80s) that are equally obvious and upfront. These emphases give the film the sense of a vintage cautionary tale, and Schumacher has little interest in elements of her characters’ lives that don’t contribute to her narrative proper. For instance, when people lose their jobs due to drinking, the events have less impact because we don’t even have a rudimentary idea of what these people do to sustain themselves and their families. The characters in this film live in a void, spouting clichés with their loved ones, sustaining a pat mood that’s occasionally disrupted by the visceral force of the misery that dysfunctional drinking wreaks.

I’m Not Here’s big moments aren’t convincing, yet they’re contrived in a manner that reflects how we flatten moments out in our minds so as to bend them to suit particular internal narratives. Schumacher and co-screenwriter Tony Cummings are truthful to our collective need for contrivance for the sake of self-mythology. Steve (J.K. Simmons) wanders his un-kept home, scarily thin, bearded, usually naked, swigging from multiple bottles of vodka while looking back on his parents’ divorce, his father’s alcoholism, his own divorce, as well as the moments of fleeting solace that he was lucky enough to savor despite being predominantly blotto. In other words, Steve is an unreliable narrator, and so the film’s dramatic limitations come to echo his inability to see beyond the scrim of his disease and the self-pity it evokes.

It’s the little moments that distinguish I’m Not Here, illustrating a precise and profound understanding of how people are alienated by their alcoholism. When Steve (played as a young man by Sebastian Stan) meets Karen (Maika Monroe), the woman he’ll marry, he mows through several beers while Karen barely touches a fruity, frothy drink. Steve heard his father commit suicide, and he tells Karen this story with a heavy aura of self-obsession, while she mentions her mother’s death from cancer with a casualness that reflects a lack of self-pity.

We’re also allowed to notice the poignant pride that Steve takes in getting sober for six months, ordering a Coke and lime at a bar with some degree of strain—a sequence that’s given weight, of course, by our knowledge of how Steve will wind up in the present day. Most devastatingly, the filmmakers fashion a scene in which we see “Stevie” as a child (Iain Armitage), in which the boy takes an immeasurable pride in being allowed to make his father’s drink. Stevie takes a sip and spits it out. Then he takes another sip and finds that it’s love at almost first sight—a love that springs in part from his need to connect with his father.

Simmons ties the film’s various threads together. He barely speaks, investing I’m Not Here with a primordial physicality of loneliness and self-loathing. That beard almost renders Simmons biblical, as he’s a Noah of a booze-addled arc that’s really a shack. Schumacher, who’s married to Simmons, gives him vignettes that drive the severity of Steve’s disconnection home, which Simmons performs with a piercing precision. Steve takes a flask out in his bathroom and empties the toothbrush holder, which is a little cup, and pours the drink in that. This action seems obscene, suggesting how domesticity is curdling under the thrall of Steve’s demons. Another moment features a clever and seemingly offhand bit of symbolism: Steve takes the batteries of his clock, stopping all sense of time, to put them in his TV remote, which controls a device that allows him to further zone out, cocooning himself.

The filmmakers wrap their various nesting stories in a fancy conceit, utilizing the principle of quantum superposition as a beacon of ambiguity. Very generically speaking, quantum superposition suggests that multiple realities can be true—a rational that might allow Steve to potentially think his way out of his present despair, or enable him to finally commit suicide. Schumacher wants to honor the endless battle of addiction by resisting finality, though the film’s ending could use a decisive punch. (Rather than concluding, the narrative just stops.) That said, Schumacher springs a wrenching image: of an older Steve embracing a son who may or may not have died in an accident. Reaching his hand out to the timeline of his younger, addled, an inattentive self, Steve takes another stab at communion.