What follows is a series of episodes about FH and Michelle, FH and his various low-level jobs, FH and a series of deranged male cronies. FH is, among his other less than admirable qualities, a junkie, and even though he seems to be telling the story from some future, postsmack perspective, the movie's pacing and continuity have the loose, rambling feel of stoned retrospection.
Much of director Maclean's strategy seems determined by fidelity to her source material: Johnson's book is a series of loosely linked short stories. The conventional approach for a film adaptation would have been to lift a few elements and threads and inflate them into a "plot." But Maclean -- and screenwriters Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia, and Oren Moverman -- were clearly attracted to the nonplot skein that runs through the book -- the gentle, nearly formless progression in FH's character. Even though the book jumps around at least as much as the film, it has a beginning, middle, and end…. Or more accurately it has a beginning and an end, with a bunch of other stuff in between, some of which could be shuffled around without damage.
For most of the film, this faithfulness to the episodic nature of Johnson's book works well: No real person's life ever has the sort of neat dramatic structure we expect on the screen, least of all the disjointed, peripatetic life of an unstable guy like FH. To have added a "plot" would have destroyed what is one of the film's major achievements -- giving us a sense of the utter unanchored aimlessness of FH and most of his flickering connections to other people.
But it would be difficult to overlook the drop in energy the film suffers at about the three-quarters mark. Some of the rearranging of chronology and conflation of characters does impose at least a ghost of a structure on the proceedings: Even though Michelle is absent for major stretches, FH's obsession with her hangs over that first three-quarters. When she suddenly and irrevocably disappears from the story, we are cast adrift. Everything that follows is anticlimactic or like the first act of an unfinished sequel.
Stylistically Maclean (Crush) employs a combination of flat, affectless narration and drug-induced surrealism; many viewers may be reminded of Trainspotting, but the more important model is Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant's brilliant breakthrough film, which also managed to impose more successfully a dramatic structure onto a very similar set of characters. All three films deftly interweave humor and horror in their most gruesome scenes.
Jesus' Son makes good use of its actors. Crudup, despite his leading-man looks, gives FH a hangdog helplessness that keeps his potentially loathsome character sympathetic. Likewise Morton -- in a role nearly the opposite of her Oscar-nominated turn in Sweet and Lowdown -- radiates an angelic sweetness even at her slovenly, drug-addled worst.
There are no other really substantial parts. Dennis Hopper contributes his iconic self for one amusing scene, and Denis Leary, Will Patton, and Holly Hunter show up briefly and effectively. But in this distinguished cast, it is once again Jack Black, hot off his triumph in High Fidelity, who stands out in his role as a hospital orderly whose lunacies, while not so different from FH's, are mysteriously untouched by the sense of doom that dogs poor FH, black cloudlike, throughout.
