'Don't Worry' offers flawed portrait of cartoonist John Callahan

“Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot” - ★ ★ ½

Macabre is a word often associated with the late cartoonist John Callahan. He's the man who in his widely published cartoons, drawn in his signature squiggly style, poked fun at lesbians, Chinese people, the handicapped, women, Oprah, Alzheimer's patients, chiropractors and even sexual harassment. His website proudly featured all the “hate mail” sent to the newspapers that published his cartoons.

But John Callahan wasn't just a provocateur. He was also a quadriplegic alcoholic. In fact, the alcoholism came first, then the handicap, then the cartooning.

Director Gus Van Sant has chosen this interesting subject for his latest film, “Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot,” with Joaquin Phoenix starring as the artist. The title is taken from Callahan's 1990 autobiography, which itself was borrowed from one of his cartoons. That drawing showed a sheriff and his backup horseback in the desert commenting on an empty wheelchair that's been overturned.

Grim, uncomfortably true and funny were Callahan's main operating modes. Van Sant seems to have tried to infuse this work with that same sort of spirit - irreverent, often unattractive, sometimes funny and sometimes offensive. Told in a jumbly, non-linear fashion, Van Sant jumps back and forth in time with disorienting casualness, shifting from a wheelchair-bound Callahan as an established artist, back to the last day he walked, and then to the early days of his therapy.

Phoenix plays Callahan as a good-time jerk, affable and sharp-witted with a drink, panicked and cruel without one. The last day he walked, he says in voiceover, he woke up without a hangover. He was still drunk, and just needed to make it to the liquor store before his hands started shaking. That day he met up with another life-of-the-party in Dexter (Jack Black) who tells him that there are better girls at a party across town. Before they get there, however, they stop at more bars, drink more, and, eventually crash. It's a riveting sequence with devastating consequences for Callahan.

The film is not exactly a portrait of the artist, as the timeline skips around so frequently that we can hardly grasp Callahan's evolution, but more so a sort of love letter to 12 Steps, centered around a man who is one of the least likely persons in the world to buy into the philosophy.

But he does, albeit with quite a few struggles and setbacks, thanks in large part to Donnie (Jonah Hill), an addict himself who leads a group therapy session made up of his hand-selected “piglets,” as he calls them. Callahan begins his reinvention, eventually finding art as an outlet.

There are moments of grace and splendor in this film, with an outstanding performance from Hill. Yet Rooney Mara, one of the most compelling actresses in film today, is a joke in this film. I kept thinking, she can't possibly only be a pretty, Swedish nurse-turned-stewardess-turned-girlfriend who is just there to make Callahan smile and tell him how special he is, can she? Oh, but she can and she is, and it is hard to understand why a movie that is so empathetic to so many characters would fail one of its main subjects so spectacularly.

<b>Starring:</b> Joaquin Phoenix, Jack Black, Rooney Mara, Jonah Hill

<b>Directed by:</b> Gus Van Sant

<b>Other:</b> An Amazon Studios release. In limited release. Rated R for language, sexual content, nudity and alcohol abuse. 113 minutes