How To Beat Your Own Demons

Clean (4/5 stars)

Clean starts out with a fairly typical premise. Emily, played wonderfully by Maggie Cheung, is a unsuccessful rocker who used to be the host pre-cable music television show in France. She now lives in Canada with her boyfriend, and along with him, while trying vainly to get a recording contract, is addicted to heroin. One night after seeing a show and having an argument about their difficulties in achieving success, they have a fight; she leaves, shoots up, and passes out in the car for the night. When she comes home she finds that he is dead from an overdose. She is arrested for possesion and must spend six months in jail. After this is when the story really begins.

Emily has a child, and in order to be able to see him and someday have custody of him, she must get clean. She struggles with this and with finding any kind of work. She gets various odd jobs that she hates, while she still dreams of becoming a success with music. Nick Nolte is her boyfriend's father, who does not trust her yet has faith that she can eventually get where she needs to be despite the fact that everyone else blames her for his son's death.

The movie does not heavily (or much at all, really) go into the bleak details of addiction like you might expect, rather if focuses on her emotional struggle against her own loneliness and failure. Thus the movie is less jarring or more laid back then you might expect; to enjoy it you need to identify with her and what she is going through, because there really isn't a lot of events to be had here.

The most enjoyable aspects of the movie are the performances. Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte both do excellent work here. If you can appreciate the choice, the intimacy of the directing and the focus of the writing on the emotional journey of Emily rather than on the actual quest to quit heroin is satisfying. It is a slow and moody picture, and one might need to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy it.