Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot

Director: Gus Van Sant

Country/Distributor: USA, Amazon Studios

Opening: July 13

I BEGAN WATCHING with no foreknowledge of the film’s backstory—a state of innocence almost impossible to come by in this day and age. I thought it must be based on a true story: why else make a guy-triumphs-over-handicaps-to-become-an-artist picture except as a docudrama? Why else would Gus Van Sant and Joaquin Phoenix, the director and actor who first paired up in the darkly funny (1995), embrace the triumph-over-adversity formula complete with a vision and an epiphany, unless it had some special meaning? And hasn’t the very idea of redemption, and the narrative arc that supports it, fallen out of favor among the unruly agnostics of contemporary cinema?