The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
June 20, 2000, TUESDAY; ALL EDITIONS
SECTION: YOUR TIME; Pg. Y1
HEADLINE: SHOOTING STAR; ON HIS WAY UP THE LADDER OFSUCCESS, BILLY CRUDUP
EXPLORES THE HIGH LIFE
BYLINE: JIM BECKERMAN, Staff Writer
Method-trained though he is, Billy Crudup couldn't get in touch with his
inner junkie to play the drug addict hero of "Jesus Son."
"I thankfully don't know how to use a needle,"Crudup says."We got to consult
a Philadelphia narcotics officer, he was a former junkie, actually, and he
showed us what we needed to do, why you cook it, those kind of things."
The good-looking, laid-back Crudup, on the independent movie A-list
(up-and-coming division) after star-making performances in "Sleepers,"
"Inventing the Abbots,""Wakingthe Dead,"and "Without Limits"(one of two films
released in 1997 aboutthe late runner Steve Prefontaine), is clearly not
averse to taking career risks.
In"Jesus Son,"a $ 2.5 million black comedy based on an acclaimed 1992
collection of loosely linked stories by Denis Johnson, Crudup plays a
character known only by his derisive nickname, FH (it stands for something
unprintable).
It's a handle the likable knucklehead earned through his ability to mess up
everything and everyone he touches, mostly people who are pretty messed up to
begin with. They include a drunk (Denis Leary) who recruits 1 FH to help him
wreck his former wife's suburban home, a pill-popping fellow hospital orderly
(Jack Black), and two women who
shape his life for worse and for better, self-destructive fellow addict
Michelle (Samantha Morton) and Mira (Holly Hunter), a semi-paralyzed woman he
meets in rehab.
The phrase"Jesus Son," taken from the Lou Reed song"Heroin," suggests the
profound euphoria sometimes felt by addicts. But this sometimes hilarious,
sometimes ghastly movie, which opened last week in Manhattan, has a very
complicated take on substance abuse.
Destructive? No question. Drugs have clearly turned FH into the human
wrecking ball he is.
"I think it sends a pretty clear message about how destructive that way of
life is,"Crudup says. "That there are pretty severe consequences."
On the other hand, Crudup says, the movie also shows very clearly that FH's
drug use is a response to a very human, even laudable, need to connect.
"He's an incredibly intuitive, compassionate person,"Crudup says.
"And when he meets somebody who's in pain, he gets that pain right away.
So in some ways, I think the drugs are a way to disassociate from it, to give
himself a break.
"In other ways, I think he has an incredibly active imagination.
Drugs are a way to join reality with his imagination. So the trick, for him,
is to find a way to reach out and touch people and use his imagination in
life while being sober. Because then it's lasting and potent, and you don't
have to kill people and you don't have to kill
yourself."
In keeping with Johnson's original stories, "Jesus Son"has an unorthodox
narrative style that mirrors FH's stoned-out world view.
FH, who tells the story in voice-over, sometimes sidetracks himself, and the
movie goes where he goes. It also sees what he sees.
For instance, when he wanders into a drive-in movie, the poles with the
speakers become crosses, and the theater becomes a vast graveyard.
"Even in these states of confusion, drug addicts are not lost souls," Crudup
says."It's important to not take them for granted while they're living these
lives. They still have joy in their lives, they still have poetry, they still
have confusion, all the things that we all have. And as soon as we in society
say that we're going to cart up all the 1 drug users and stick them on the
periphery of society so that we don't encounter that side of ourselves, we
lose a sense of what it means to be human."
Born on Long Island and raised in Florida and Texas, Crudup, 32, first came
to prominence on Broadway in Tom Stoppard's 1995 play "Arcadia,"and then in a
revival of William Inge's"Bus Stop"(his co-star, Mary-Louise Parker, became
his significant other).
Now a movie veteran, he says the camera still takes a bit of getting used to.
"It's complicated,"he says."When there's an 80-pound instrument pointed right
at you, and it's moving in very slowly, and there's 40 people behind it going
'ooh, 'aahh, 'um-hum, it requires a tremendous amount of focus."
