In the past several years McConaughey has mostly squandered his much deserved career comeback/transformation dubbed the McConaissance with a series of regressive and mediocre roles of which Moondog is the proverbial bottom(essentially an aged grotesque version of Wooderson from Dazed and Confused). McConaughey brings his innate all-right-all-right charm to this role but it is incongruous with the affluent lecherous addict walking-incarnation of misplaced Hemingway sanctification that the character is. The fault though doesn't reside with McConaughey but with the script and direction.
Visually lush and colorful with an infectious if periodically on-the-nose soundtrack the production elements are top notch but the narrative itself is tired and utterly tone-deaf. Perhaps this story would have made an impression on teenagers in the mid-90s but in our current time this feels like some white male hetero undergrad film student obsessed with Catcher In The Rye and Bukowski's graduation project ie immature, pretentious, and ignorantly mono-cultural.
The movie attempts to portray sexuality in some pseudo-progressive bohemian manner that is actually sexist. It's shows drug and alcohol use as abhorrently positive and reinforces the acidic tortured-addict-artist archetype. Moondog is supposedly a poet, the character repeatedly says how good he is as do multiple other characters but the poetry he quotes and the one poem he recites is just 3rd rate Kerouac aping. All this as well as the implicit privilege Moondog is protected by which give all of his "adversity" virtually no stakes make for an astonishingly boring, predictable, and superficial.
Don't See It.
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