Biopics are, generally speaking, bad. At their best, they don't really attempt to dramatize the life of their subjects, instead using historical events as a lens for an independently gripping story and clearly signalling an interpretation of a real person, rather than a hollow stringing together of details that fit into a traditional three-act structure. And a biopic of a recently deceased, widely revered writer should, on its face, probably be an even worse idea, without much of the critical distance required to extract meaning from a celebrated, complex life. But here we are, encountering the first trailer for The End of the Tour -- a movie based on Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, journalist David Lipsky's account of a five-day road trip with David Foster Wallace for a Rolling Stone profile that was never published. To its credit, The End of the Tour, which reportedly focuses tightly on those five days, isn't a full biopic. And it has a pretty good pedigree -- directed by James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now) and written by playwright Donald Margulies, the movie stars Jesse Eisenberg as the insecure Lipsky and Jason Segel as Wallace. (If you don't think Segel has the potential to play this part, catch him in the criminally underseen Jeff, Who Lives at Home.) Still, that doesn't necessarily alleviate justified anxieties about the possible ways one could misinterpret or depict the author of Infinite Jest -- anxieties that aren't necessarily alleviated, but are at least substantially muddled, by the debate surrounding the film's relation to Wallace's estate.
From the trailer, The End of the Tour looks, for good or ill, about like what you'd expect. It's hard to get a bead
on Segel, or Eisenberg, really -- they're both such well-known actors, with such well-defined mannerisms, that it seems like it will be difficult, to say the least, for them to do the feat of biographical interpretation required for anything more than a vanity embodiment of celebrity. (Wallace's well-known cadences coming out of Segel's mouth sound a bit bizarre.) Still, The End of the Tour has received excellent reviews from its debut at Sundance, and if there's a certain hokeyness to it all, well, so was a lot of Wallace's writing. Maybe we'll all be surprised.
