Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot

Joaquin Phoenix plays John Callahan, a young man in Portland whose heavy drinking and reckless ways come to an abrupt end when a car crash leaves him paralyzed. Told he will have to rely on a wheelchair and on hands that no longer work as they once did, he resists giving up alcohol until his girlfriend and a sponsor push him toward a recovery program. There he finds an unexpected talent for drawing, and his blunt, darkly funny cartoons begin appearing in a local newspaper before reaching readers in other countries.

Gus Van Sant directed and wrote the screenplay for the film, which was produced by Steve Golin, Charles-Marie Anthonioz and Nicolas Lhermitte. It is the seventeenth of the eighteen features Van Sant has directed in chronological order, arriving between The Sea of Trees and Dead Man's Wire. Jonah Hill plays Donny, Rooney Mara appears as Annu, and Jack Black plays Dexter; the credited cast runs to seventy-three names and the credited crew to forty-four.

Made for about four million dollars, the film took in a similar amount worldwide. On IMDb it holds 6.8/10 from roughly thirty-three thousand votes, and on TMDB 6.7/10 from a much smaller number of voters. A critics' rating of 6.6/10 from 188 reviews sits close to those audience scores, indicating a broadly middling reception rather than a sharply divided one.