'Low Down': A teen and her artist/addict father
'Your father is very concerned for your welfare," Sheila Albany tells her estranged 15-year-old daughter, Amy-Jo, whose story is told in the true-life drama Low Down. "[He] fears that . . . that you suffer from a sort of self-loathing."
'Your father is very concerned for your welfare," Sheila Albany tells her estranged 15-year-old daughter, Amy-Jo, whose story is told in the true-life drama Low Down. "[He] fears that . . . that you suffer from a sort of self-loathing."
A moving, harrowing, if sometimes hackneyed account of drug addiction, familial love, and art, Low Down is about the complex relationship between Amy-Jo and her father, celebrated jazz pianist Joe Albany.
The scene beautifully encapsulates the Albanys' twisted dynamics. We're in a dive bar where the alcoholic Sheila (Lena Headey) has been drinking since early morning. She can barely stand up, yet hurls insults at the girl with great facility.
It's clear Amy-Jo is the grown-up here.
After two years, she has tracked down her mother out of desperation: Joe's heroin addiction is spiraling out of control and the teenager feels out of her depth.
Receiving nothing but scorn from Mom, Amy-Jo ends up visiting her dad's sleazy, lecherous dealer to buy him the heroin he craves.
Adapted by Amy-Jo Albany from her 2003 memoir Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales From Childhood, and directed by music video specialist Jeff Preiss, Low Down features superb performances by Elle Fanning (Maleficent) as Amy-Jo and John Hawkes (Winter's Bone, Deadwood) as her dad, an Atlantic City native who played piano with bebop maestro Charlie Parker in the late 1940s and 1950s before sinking into addiction and obscurity in the 1960s.
The film picks up his story in the mid-1970s when Joe enjoyed a wild creative burst that led to the release of 11 albums by the early '80s.
On probation after yet another stint in jail, Joe and Amy-Jo, then 13, share a dilapidated room in a skanky residential hotel in Hollywood. Joe is trying to go straight, picking up the odd gig and jumping at any chance to record new music. But he can't let go of heroin, his constant companion for more than three decades.
Part adoring fan, part parent, Amy-Jo helps him keep it together. Whenever he goes off the rails, his supportive mother (Glenn Close) takes in Amy-Jo.
There's a certain sameness to contemporary accounts of down-and-out artists. From The Basketball Diaries to Junkie and Barfly, most of the action revolves around the utter tedium of the addict's life.
Low Down threatens at times to sink into the same dreary sameness.
Yet Fanning's performance rescues the film from mediocrity. Her narration provides a much-needed ironic distance from the usual junkie story, while her skill as an actress helps us appreciate the complex emotional tangle that ensnares children of addicts and artists alike.
Low Down *** (out of four stars)
Directed by Jeff Preiss. With John Hawkes, Elle Fanning, Glenn Close, Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage. Distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories.
Running time: 1 hour, 59 mins.
Parent's guide: R (profanity, heavy drug use, sexual content, smoking).
Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse.
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