A Million Little Pieces ** (2018, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Odessa Young, Giovanni Ribisi, Juliette Lewis, Dash Mihok, Charles Parnell) – Movie Review

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is excellent in director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s A Million Little Pieces (2018) as 23-year-old aspiring writer James Frey, who is massively self-destructing through addiction at drugs and alcohol. His brother Bob Frey Jr (Charlie Hunnam) checks him into a religious-founded strict facility centre for addicts for six weeks to clean out and face his past traumas. It’s his very last chance, clean out or he’ll die.

The screenplay by Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, based on James Frey’s story, is serviceable and interesting, but it treads familiar ground and is never quite special enough. Sometimes it is never quite totally convincing and sometimes it seems to be retreading the genre’s clichés. It recalls both Beautiful Boy and Boy Erased, and both films worked better, though Aaron Taylor-Johnson is the equal of Timothée Chalamet and Lucas Hedges in these films.

There are several other characters, but it is a one-person movie, and all eyes are on Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who deserves award recognition. He throws himself body and soul into the movie. You certainly feel his character’s pain, agony even. Hunnam, Billy Bob Thornton, Odessa Young, Giovanni Ribisi and Charles Parnell (all as fellow addicts), Juliette Lewis (as kindly counsellor Joanne) and Dash Mihok (as carer Lincoln) all work hard for the movie, but they don’t have enough screen time or sufficiently developed characters to work on, which gives them a hard time to be convincing. The romance between James Frey and Odessa Young’s hopeless addict Lilly is frankly unbelievable, especially with fraternising between male and female addicts banned as the facility, and later developments in their story are even more unbelievable.

Sam Taylor-Johnson by and large shoots plainly and directly, and mostly just concentrates lovingly on filming Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance, which is the right route to go here, though her few directorial flourishes seem out of place.

Beautiful Boy profits from seeing the young addict’s story through the eyes of his father, but here we haven’t a clue what the main character’s family are up to. His brother apparently loves him but doesn’t seem to be doing much at all for him. What’s his story?

It was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 10 September 2018, but not released in the UK till 30 August 2019.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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