SOME SPOILERS: WITHNAIL AND I (1987)

My son invited me to a screening of Withnail and I from a 16 mm print. We’re lucky to have Kinonik, a wonderful nonprofit that rescues and preserves film prints and screens them twice a week. I’d never seen the movie before, but my son was sure I’d like it. He was right.

It’s a strange little film—funny, sad, and slightly mad. Two aspiring actors stumble through poverty and self-doubt, trying both to make a living while also attempting barely to stay afloat. “Being okay” is a challenge everyone faces, but when you add an artistic calling that can turn on something as random as what a casting director had for breakfast, you get strangeness, hilarity, melancholy, and maybe even a flash of joy. And, occasionally, a burst of righteous defiance.

Actors, at their best, spend their days in a kind of therapy—probing the psychology of their characters and, inevitably, of themselves. But as the old saying goes, the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. So too with actors who become their own analysts. Withnail and I is that woe writ large: a funny, painful portrait of creative people trying to survive their own introspection.