Jeff Daniels is the driving force of this film. He wrote the play and plays the lead in the film, and his performance is most of what makes it worth watching. His ability to portray a broken man that is, at his heart, still trying to create, but unable to fully face is demons, is beautifully tragic. What makes his performance even better is the way that he's able to maintain a semblance of decency even when he's vomiting on a train or passed out drunk on a station pew. Harris's character is broken, but he's not unintelligent; he knows how to pull himself up, but he refuses to do so because he is used to the way his life is now. Daniel's range of emotion is really put on display in a wonderful way, and, as he is the one that wrote the words he's saying, it's easy to see why he's so earnest about the words that come through his character. There is truth in what Harris's character says, even though it might not be easy to accept.
But while I enjoyed the themes, Jeff Daniels' performance, and most of the writing, I wouldn't go so far as to call it a great film. Macias is a stage manager working at the Purple Rose Theatre Company in Michigan, and it seems to me that most of his acting in this film would feel more at home in a play than it would in a film. Stage acting and film acting are very different beasts. For the most part, Macias holds his own, but there are scenes where I didn't quite buy his earnestness. Also, there were a few audio issues throughout, where characters would fade away and come back in one take, and there were a few scenes of overlapping dialogue in the train station that were simply impossible to discern what was being said.
Review of Guest Artist
