Acute Misfortune

This tells the story of the later years of the artist Adam Cullen – an Archibald Prize winner whose darker impulses saw him deliberately chasing an outsider status, and his relationship with his biographer, journalist Erik Jensen – a relationship that’s part performance, part intimidation, part enabling, part exploitation and partially a perverse series of acts of love. Based on Jensen’s book (and co-written by him), it’s pretty unsparing on both men – Cullen’s best work is behind him and he seeks refuge in drugs, in guns, in big-noting himself and in minor acts of rebellion, and in following him, Jensen is anything but the impartial observer – he’s along for the ride, nervously enjoying and enabling Cullen’s worst tendencies (even while managing to get himself shot in the leg). Most of the film is these two men circling round one another – Daniel Henshall looming as the brutish Cullen, and Toby Wallace as the jaded cub-reporter Jensen. In supporting roles, Max Cullen brings a wounded dignity to Adam’s dad (Max Cullen’s actually Adam Cullen’s cousin, meaning he’s playing his own uncle); and Genieveve Lemon similarly has great presence as his mother. This is by no means an easy film to watch – in many ways, it’s another film about how Australian Men are horrible to one another and everybody else around them – but it’s intriguing and engrossing.