What Addiction Movie Are You?

Which addiction movie most accurately reflects your journey -- whether it be the struggle, the recovery, or both?

movie projectorLet’s play a game. Let’s play, “What addiction movie are you?”

Not necessarily your favorite movie, or the one that should have won an Academy Award, but the one that most accurately reflects your journey — whether it be the struggle, the recovery, or both. The one with that one scene or line of dialogue or character that really hits home.

Of course, the first movie I will mention is The Verdict starring Paul Newman as the down-and-out alcoholic trial lawyer, Frank Galvin.  Frank is an ambulance chaser. A “drunk.” Divorced. Reading the obituaries as if they were want ads. Frank Galvin shows up at funeral parlors, paying off the owners for access. The chiropractor’s office was my funeral parlor. I was Frank Galvin.  I also experienced the despair of Frank knowing his career was spiraling down the toilet but feeling powerless to stop it. The only solution being to take another drink. The powerlessness of addiction.  See the trailer below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwjB5WGGxr0

Here are some other movies on addiction and recovery that I would call “Brian movies,” as they so closely mirror my experience in some way that I actually become the characters when I watch them.

The image of Jamie Conway, the cocaine-addicted aspiring writer, standing alone on a dance floor in NYC as the club closes in the movie Bright Lights, Big City hits hard for me. I see in Jamie the loneliness of addiction, the all-night cocaine and booze binge waiting for something to happen, the friends who are also addicts, and the career slipping away due to addiction. Being the last man standing at the nightclub searching for that “last line” of blow.  That was me so many nights on the club scene in Dallas.  See the trailer below.

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The final scene of the Dick Van Dyke movie, The Morning After, always puts a knot in my stomach. It is a hard-to-find movie and the first movie I ever saw on the subject of “alcoholism.” Dick’s character is a successful executive destroying his life with alcohol. I still cry at the end with the final image of Charlie alone, drunk, and hopeless on a deserted beachfront with a rendition of the Beatles’ “Yesterday” playing. A beaten alcoholic. It happened to me. It happens every day of the year around the world.

But when I think of moments of hopelessness followed by the slow march to recovery, I also see the character Daryl Poynter, played by Michael Keaton in the movie Clean and Sober. Michael Keaton plays a successful commercial real estate executive deep in cocaine addiction. He’s destroying his professional life thanks to the alcohol and cocaine. His personal life is full of superficial relationships, as would be the case with anyone who won’t let others see who they truly are. One morning, Daryl wakes up in bed with a girl he barely knows who has overdosed. She ultimately dies. The scene is hard for me to watch. That look of bewilderment on his face, not knowing for a moment where he was, who he was with, what was happening, and why. I never had someone OD next to me, but I did have those mornings, waking up next to someone I barely knew, not sure how I got there or how she did, a love of drugs being the only tie that brought us together.  Also like Daryl’s character, my life became an exhausting struggle to maintain a world of lies and deceit, anything to avoid facing the possibility that I was addicted to drugs and alcohol and engaging in a host of other destructive behaviors. After the woman he’s with ODs, Daryl begins his journey through rehab, skeptically at first, and then starts into 12-step. The final scene of him at the 12-step podium sharing his story brings back vivid memories of my own recovery. When he holds that 30-day chip in his hand with no promise of making it through day 31, I can practically feel one of my desire chips pressed against my palm. Daryl’s progression from denial and lies to acceptance that he could not do it on his own resonates with me. See the trailer below.

The last of my favorite “addiction” movies is, believe it or not, American Psycho. Is Brian Cuban like Patrick Bateman? What could a movie about a mentally disturbed mass killer have to do with addiction? Sure, Patrick Bateman is a high-powered stockbroker during the day and mass murderer and cocaine user by night. And I’m in no way trying to equate the mental health issues I or other addicts might face with being a monstrous serial killer. But there are ways that movie reaches me. For one, the movie does an amazing job skewering the late 80s coke-and-club culture, with Bateman spending long nights chatting with his coworkers about who has the best business cards and whether or not the club has a good bathroom to do coke in or not, then griping when they get scammed on a cocaine buy and end up snorting Sweet’N Low. I’ve been there.

But more than the depiction of materialistic culture, the movie resonates with me in the way its anti-hero’s polished façade is just a mask. Early in the movie, in describing himself, Bateman says, “There is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable . . . I simply am not there.” For me, the experience of having addiction to drugs and alcohol and hiding it away from my respectable world felt a lot like this. I might look like I’m here, shaking your hand, but I’m not. In my mind, I’m already at the bar with a drink and an eighth ounce of coke. You are seeing what I want you to see. A respectable lawyer. A happy lawyer. From that standpoint, in the practiced disguises of addiction, I was Patrick Bateman. (And I’m still trying to get that reservation at Dorsia.) See the trailer below.

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For me, these are just a few fictional stories that come to mind that I identify with so strongly in some ways that to watch them makes my heart beat a little faster. It’s difficult, but also cathartic. Other addiction stories might not reach me as easily or powerfully, but might touch others more closely instead. In a movie like Requiem for a Dream, I can recognize that abyss, the deep hole that the characters fall into as they succumb to heroin and amphetamine addictions. But their stories don’t brush up against mine in quite the same way as Daryl’s or Jamie’s, for instance.  See the trailer below.

You might identify with another movie. Or maybe it’s a song, painting, a dream, or even a smell that takes you to a different time and place and brings a long-recessed memory into the present. These movies are of course ones that are simply personal to me. What addiction movie are you? Feel free to email me your favorite ones and why.

  1. http://www.americanbar.org/groups/lawyer_assistance.html
  2. http://collegiaterecovery.org/programs/
  3. http://www.aa.org/
  4. http://www.smartrecovery.org/
  5. http://www.celebraterecovery.com/

BrianCubanBrian Cuban (@bcuban) is The Addicted Lawyer. A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he somehow made it through as an alcoholic then added cocaine to his résumé as a practicing attorney. He went into recovery April 8, 2007. He left the practice of law and now writes and speaks on recovery topics, not only for the legal profession, but on recovery in general. He can be reached at brian@addictedlawyer.com.