Jesse Eisenberg & Jason Segel

In 1996 David Foster Wallace’s 1079-page novel Infinite Jest hit the literary scene like a rocket. The publisher’s marketing efforts meant the book was everywhere, but the man himself—shy, full of self-doubt, not wanting to be trapped into any literary poseur moments and seeing them as inevitable—was difficult to read. This movie (trailer) uses a tyro journalist’s eye to probe Wallace during an intense five days of interviewing toward the end of the Infinite Jest book tour.

As a tryout writer for Rolling Stone, reporter David Lipsky had begged for the assignment to write a profile of Wallace, which ultimately the magazine never published. But the tapes survived, and after Wallace’s suicide in 2008 they became the basis for Lipsky’s 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which fed David Margulies screenplay. The plot of the movie is minimal; instead, it’s a deep exploration of character. It may just be two guys talking, but I found it tectonic.

Director James Ponsoldt has brought nuanced, intelligent performances from his two main actors—Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as reporter David Lipsky. Lipsky is a novelist himself, with a so-so book to his credit. Wallace has reached the heights, and what would it take for Lipsky to scramble up there too? Jealousy and admiration are at war within him and, confronted with Wallace’s occasional oddness, one manifestation of which is the attempt to be Super-Regular Guy—owning dogs, eating junk food, obsessively watching television—he isn’t sure what to feel. You see it on his face.

Is Lipsky friend or foe? He’s not above snooping around Wallace’s house or chatting up his friends to nail his story. Lipsky rightly makes Wallace nervous, the tape recorder makes him nervous; he amuses, he evades, he delivers a punch of a line, he feints. When the going gets too rough, Lipsky falls back on saying, “You agreed to the interview,” and Wallace climbs back in the saddle, as if saying to himself, just finish this awful ride, then back to the peace and solitude necessary actually to write. In the meantime, he is, as A. O. Scott said in his New York Times review, “playing the role of a writer in someone else’s fantasy.”

The movie’s opening scene delivers the fact of the suicide, which by design looms over all that follows, in the long flashback to a dozen years earlier and the failed interview. You can’t help but interpret every statement of Wallace’s through that lens. The depression is clear. He’s been treated for it and for alcoholism, from which he seems to have recovered. The two Davids walk on the snow-covered farm fields of Wallace’s Illinois home and talk about how beautiful it is, but it is bleak, and even in as jam-packed an environment as the Mall of America Wallace’s conversation focuses on the emptiness at the heart of life. Yet his gentle humor infuses almost every exchange, and Lipsky can be wickedly funny too.

Wallace can’t help but feel great ambivalence toward Lipsky; he recognizes Lipsky’s envy and his hero-worship, and both are troubling. He felt a truth inside himself, but he finds it almost impossible to capture and isn’t sure he has, saying, “The more people think you’re really great, the bigger your fear of being a fraud is.” Infinite Jest was a widely praised literary success, but not to Wallace himself.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 92%, audiences, 89%.

(photo: M Pincus, creative commons license)