Lonesome Jim
Tags: depressing

Plot synopsis:
Jim (Casey Affleck) is a perennially gloomy 27-year-old aspiring writer from Goshen, Indiana who had moved to New York City in hopes of finding success with his writing. After two years of barely making a living as a dog walker, he decides to move back home to his parents' house in Goshen.
Jim's 32-year-old brother Tim (Kevin Corrigan) is a recently divorced father of two young girls whose business recently failed. Tim has moved back into his parents' home and works in the ladder factory that's owned and operated by their father Don (Seymour Cassel) and cheerful mother Sally (Mary Kay Place). Jim has no interest in the family business and he resists pressure from Don to start working there.
Jim meets Anika (Liv Tyler), a nurse, in a bar and they end up having sex in a hospital bed, though Jim finishes almost immediately.
After a conversation between the two brothers on whose life is more pathetic, Tim, having previously made repeated unsuccessful attempts to commit suicide, drives his car into a tree. He is gravely injured, in a coma, and hospitalized. Jim finally gives in to Don and works in the factory by taking over Tim's duties. He also takes over Tim's job as the coach of a girls basketball team. The team, which has not scored a single point in the last 14 games, includes both of Tim's daughters.
While visiting Tim is in the hospital, Jim runs into Anika, who works in pediatrics. They arrange a date, but on arriving to pick her up, he discovers she is a single mother. Their relationship progresses, however. Anika is sympathetic to Jim's problems, and she decides to stand by him even when he tries to convince her that it's in her best interest to not be around him.
At the ladder factory, Jim encounters his uncle Stacy or "Stace" (Mark Boone Junior), who prefers to be called "Evil." Over a joint, Evil offers advice about premature ejaculation, and they become better acquainted. Evil offers Jim some recreational drugs and asks Jim to open a checking account for him so he can pay for things by mail. Evil gives Jim $4,000, saying it is saved-up birthday and Christmas and graduation presents.
Jim's mother, Sally, is arrested by DEA officers for allegedly shipping illegal drugs through the store's FedEx account. Evil is the drug dealer, but Jim cannot get him to confess. Evil points out that Jim will be implicated if he tries to report Evil, as he has opened an account with Evil's cash and will test positive for drug use. Eternal optimist that she is, Sally makes friends with her fellow prisoners and accepts a novel from Jim when he visits. Eventually she is released on bail.
Despite working at the factory and feeling responsible for his mother's imprisonment, Jim allows his depression to be softened by Anika and finds himself believing that life is worth living. Jim invites Anika and her son to move to New Orleans with him, but after Jim gets cold feet and makes a questionable decision, the move seems to be off the table. Jim finally decides to leave town for New Orleans by himself, leaving a note for his parents promising not to take their love for granted again and revealing Evil as the drug dealer. Anika shows up at the bus station to say goodbye. Jim departs on the bus, but as Anika drives home with her son, Jim is seen running after them, luggage in hand. He asks "for a ride" and the movie ends with Jim, out-of-breath, finally getting a bottle of water from Ben in the back seat.
=== References ===
Jim refers to the authors he admires. These authors include:
Richard Yates
Earnest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises is shown when it is given to Jim's mom in prison.
Virginia Woolf
Edgar Poe
Silvia Plath
William Burroughs
Breece D. Pancake
Beckett
Dorothy Parker

Review: Casey Affleck does a good job becoming the unlovable loser that you're actually interested in watching in this film.
And for what it's worth, I feel like this film did a great job avoiding indie cliché's.
Steve Buscemi has mastered the art of subtlety and after seeing this movie and reading a few user reviews, I gather it's lost to a large number of people.
The film is like Jim, sad and brooding but with the hint of a good heart trying to find a way out.
This is very funny and melancholy piece that's well worth a watch for people who enjoy films like this..
Some of the jokes had me laughing out loud at midnight; e.g., when brother #1 says "awesome" upon learning brother #2 has bedded Liv Tyler, #2 thanks him - to which #1 says "No, I'm thinking her standards are so low I've still got a chance".The movie is chock full of tiny lines of great dialog.
I hate to use clichés but Lonesome Jim is the perfect example of "What you see (and hear) is exactly what you get.Casey Aflleck could easily have played his role as manic or overly deadpan but finds a great balance.
Annika (Liv Tyler) doesn't like the photo of a dour Ernest Hemingway that Jim (Casey Affleck) has on his bedroom wall.
The casting is superb, and between Buscemi's measured pace and first-time screenwriter Jim Strouse's unpredictable (and semi-autobiographical) story turns, we get to know and care about these people...even though they each exhibit traits we definitely do not like.
If you've ever felt bored, alone, defeated, then you'll love Lonesome Jim. If you're from or have ever visited the Midwest for a significant amount of time, you'll love this movie.
Even the little sight gag of seeing the 3 bars with similar names felt familiar to me and I couldn't help but chuckle along with the audience.Jim (Casey Affleck) has returned home dehydrated and depressed and is looking for sympathy and attention from his family.
Jim meets Anika (Liv Tyler) during his visit and her gentle observations about her small town life offers the grace that his family can never provide.This movie reminded me of the Kenneth Lonergan film You Can Count on Me in both pacing and the way the return of the brother stirs up issues in a family.
But of all the things you can say about Lonesome Jim, you can't say it is badly made.This film is like a meditation: it totally clears the mind of everything else and allows you to focus on what is there in front of you.The grainy film did not strike me as low quality or cheap.
It made the film like watching home movies; there is nothing glamorous about this scene.
It almost transforms film into a cartoon drama by the younger sibling.Is the main character Jim (Casey Affleck) suffering from depression?
But that assessment papers over the interesting sources of the emotion stifling: the relationship between son and parents, and how he has subverted his personality with them; and the relationship he has with the rest of his hometown.The whole thing is so real  we especially digest meaning during Jim's driving scenes, inevitably at twilight when the post industrial fading rural landscape is at its most evocative, stirring feelings of profound longing and sadness.(There must be a retrospective of Sensitive Boy flicks somewhere.
I seen Lonesome Jim during the film festival in Athens Ohio at OU and I loved it!Lathargic is a horrible way to describe it.
Casey, Liv and the rest keep things over the top and fresh and the overall presentation is a nice change of pace from the standard summer movie.Clever writing.
I did think the film could have done with an injection of adrenalin half way through as by that point u are kind of mystified as to why the lead character is still depressed.
the only major disappointment was the ending of the movie , which can be predicted after watching the opening ten minutes.i also thought the casting wasn't that great.
affleck looks just a little too cool and smug as the lonely Jim , and Tyler plays the same character she seems to play in every other movie i have seen her in (mrs sexy + sensitive) .overall , this movie is not bad , but could have been better..
You'll feel that it's just your luck to have chosen to watch a movie that turns out to be a complete waste of time.Otherwise you might be able to make it through this film unscathed (I didn't, BTW), safe in the knowledge that your life is so much better than Jim's.
I'll just write this review and laugh as the film plays in the background and stumbles onward to some kind of presumably horrible conclusion which I don't care to ever see or know.What accounts for my hostility to this movie?
This movie details this story with an overlay of dark moods , while transitioning a sexual tryst into the development of a mature man-women relationship and at same time bringing the character Jim into an adult to child relationship with its accompanying responsibilities.
Lonesome Jim achieves all this while at the same time bringing the movies audiences quite often to laughter which certainly attests to Steve Buscemi's directing ability and the screen writing skill of James C.
Casey Affleck might be a good actor in that he made me detest Lonesome Jim for the laziness and pathetic character he played.
But what I actually experienced was not unlike that of leaving one of those smalltown bars with a belly full of cheap whiskey and an armful of cheap floozy, heading back to your apartment with a mushy brain full of exciting prospects that inevitably disintegrate into the reality of alcohol-induced impotence and headspinning regurgitation.In other words, this movie left me flat and unrequited and sorry that I wasted the time and the money that it took me to get to that state - the film equivalent of waking up next to that cheap floozy the next morning, or if you happen to be the floozy, waking up next to that stinking and farting and unshaven imbecile.
But that's how life usually works.This is a much better view than the low marks indicate, but it's not great film-making either.
27 Year old Jim (Casey Afleck) a depressed aspiring writer journeys back home to small town, Indiana after utter failure to assimilate and attain success in New York.
Lonesome Jim is kind of like a romantic dark comedy about a dysfunctional family whose two boys are total losers.
Despite getting a reasonably good performance from Casey Affleck, a perfect complement from Mary Kay Place and good face from Liv Tyler, this movie suffers from a depressing script shot at a pace so lethargic it appears to be walking to an art-house seeking limited distribution.
And that's pretty much the movie, until for some inexplicable reason he starts to round the corner just in time to roll the credits.Filmed entirely on location in Goshen, Indiana, the movie is at its best portraying Midwestern small-town life.
While Jim starts to fall in love with her and he cares for her son.Directed by Steve Buscemi (Animal Factory, Intreview, Trees Lounge) made an bittersweet dramatic comedy that many moments of truths and for those who had dreams that never came true.
His girlfriend does her best to break him out of it, crisis events in his life should draw him out of it, but nothing works.Liv Tyler actually gets a chance to act in this film, and is excellent as Jim's bubbly, optimistic and pragmatic girlfriend.
Her girl-next-door part is one of the best in the movie, not only because you sympathize with her efforts to hump Jim into a better mood.Good stuff, watch it if you get the chance..
Nevertheless, Jim is a compelling character, and Steve Buscemi appears to be quite talented as a director, so this is still worth seeing..
He even complains to his even more depressed divorced brother "I came home to have a nervous breakdown but you beat me to it." Each time he in a small, even ineffectual way steps up to the plate and accepts responsibility for another person and his actions towards people we cheer as a progressive victory against his no man is an island loneliness.Casey Affleck as "Tim" is so adorably woe begone that it is not surprising that his mother (a scarily cheerful Mary Kay Place, recalling her "Mary Hartman" days) and Liv Tyler, as "Anika" are drawn to him as a fixer-upper.
Strouse's debut script, and his autobiographical Indiana settings (and he sweetly thanks a lot of family members besides the ones who were extras), well capture the non-anonymity of Midwest small town relationships, with their entanglement of friends, neighbors, parents, children, ex's, hospital, community center basketball team and local bars (as director Steve Buscemi showed so well in a different locale in his first feature "Trees Lounge").
With a ladder factory instead of dolls, the atmosphere is like a sweeter, more romantic "Bubble" without the mystery.Jack Rovello as little "Ben" is one of the most appealing child actors seen in years and his on-screen relationship with Affleck is not clichéd in its back and forth as each fulfills a need in the other.The soundtrack emphasizes that "Tim" is not in NYC any more with very twangy country music always on the radios, all nicely non-commercial selections.Much as I was rooting for the characters, the laser digital photography or whatever was distractingly poor quality blown up on a big screen at the IFC Center in NYC.
I have yet to see it.It's not that the characters weren't real or developed or that they didn't do their job well, they were and they did.I actually registered just to make this comment so people would not be mislead by that ridiculous rating here, as I was.On the good side, Liv Taylor was her usual beautiful sexy self.
What makes this movie so amusing is that every character in this film is depressed about one thing or another.
But other than those three things which aren't that big of issues, I really enjoyed "Lonesome Jim" for its dark humor and characters.
It was a nice change from most movies I see with happy characters.Casey Affleck did a good job playing the role as Jim. He nailed the depressed stoner look on the head.
The casting for this film was very well picked and each actor chosen did a good job at the role they played."Lonesome Jim" was directed by Steve Buscemi.
I have never seen a movie that he directed before but I like what he did with this film on such a small budget.
I always knew Steve Buscemi was a weird guy with talent but I never thought he would direct a movie about a family suffering from depressing.In the end, "Lonesome Jim" is a depressing comedy for anyone who has ever been depressed.
It's a film for people who like dark comedies or movies that are out of the ordinary but other than that I can't see this movie being attractive to many unless you're a fan of Liv Tyler or Casey Affleck.
I am a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Steve and will cheerfully watch anything with him in it.So, being a good actor doesn't necessarily make one a good director, but I thought Trees Lounge was pretty good, even though it was hard for me to really enjoy because I don't drink, and the movie was all about drinking.The next one I saw was Animal Factory, which I found to be bland, conventional and unrealistic, lacking the grit of real prison life.
But as a director Buscemi doesn't grab attention as as much as require an audience to be strange enough to enjoy loser, slacker guys whose boredom and inactivity are as palpable as the audience eyes that regularly peek at watches hoping the boredom will soon be over.In Lonesome Jim, Casey Affleck plays feckless Jim, who's returning home to Indiana as a failed writer recently walking dogs for cash in Manhattan.
If Affleck is not this affectless in real life, then he's a great actor; if he is this torpid anyway, then let's wish him the same fate as his brother, who thankfully has been absent from the screen of late.Buscemi listlessly creates a world where Liv Tyler's nurse is a welcome respite from slow-talking, slow-moving friends and relatives.
Jim has no such hopes nor does the film have characters interesting enough to survive the boredom on both sides of the screen.Liv Tyler's Anika says to Jim, "There are so many fun and cheery people in the world.
Jim returns home to his family, who live in a white, working class, American small town in Indiana.
It's a slice-of-life movie.I liked it, but I would not expect most people to enjoy it.
Unless you really enjoy dark, small town underdog studies.At some point this young guy has to realize that it doesn't matter if you are depressed, you still have to find a way to make a living, and get on with life.I don't think it portrayed the Midwest as depressing, or his parents as losers.
I felt embarrassed for Mary Kay Place in the preposterously stereotypic role as the half-witted but good-hearted mother, and for Tyler.The good performances of the seasoned actors in this film may or may not reflect directorial skill on Steve Buscemi's part.
This film (like Buscemi's also marvelous "Trees Lounge") seems organic to the story it's telling.
And so in a few words : Lonesome Jim is a simple film about life, dreams and redemption..
"Lonesome Jim" was directed by Steve Buscemi - a fact I missed when I first watched it.
The film poster says it all - he lives under his own dark cloud.But Buscemi accomplished something quite well - he made the entire film feel like the inside of Jim's head.
Lonesome, Miserable, Boring Jim. I enjoy many types of movies, from the big blockbusters to the small independents, and when I saw Steve Buscemi had directed this one, I rented it with some enthusiasm.
A magnificently constructed, witty, well thought out piece of cinema, it manages to inspire whilst simultaneously causing associations with the audience.A failure in New York City, Jim (Casey Affleck) returns home to live with his over doting mother and distant father (Mary Kay Place and Seymour Cassel).
Taking over the responsibilities, his life is hardly going anywhere, even when including his budding relationship with nurse Anika (Liv Tyler).As a third feature film direction by Steve Buscemi, he's chosen a cracker.
Written based on personal experience by James C Strouse (the film even featuring the family in minor roles throughout), "Lonesome Jim" is a thought provoking story of a depressive returning to his family home and learning the truth about life.
The cinematography and camera angles are chosen perfectly, and as a director Buscemi improves with every production.Just like "Garden State", "Lonesome Jim" has it's flaws.
This story about Jim an alienated young man played by Casey Affleck coming back home to Indianna all depressed is a common enough story, but there really has to be something unique about the telling of this tale for it to stand out.
Although I don't know this for sure, I would not be surprised to find out that this is a first screenplay and that the writer is a young man.Still, the people in the film are generally good, Seymour Cassell as Jim's domineering dad and Kevin Corrigan as his stupid brother have all worked with Steve Buscemi as co-actors and Buscemi does get good performances from them, which is a major thing for a director to do, but to what end?Overall, the story is not particularly original as a movie story although when these kinds of things happen to an individual in real life, it can seem like no one else has ever experienced anything like it before.
Watch Casey Affleck hold his own in Gerry along side Matt Damon if you don't believe me.There are some throwaway bits that I would have liked to explore more, like when Mary Kay Place as Jim's mother ends up in jail and makes friends with all the nice ladies in County Jail, her natural perkiness is wonderful to behold.
Perhaps that wouldn't work for Jim's character, but the film could have done with a few more outbursts to break up the quiet environment.
Quiet desperation affects Jim, the main character in Steve Buscemi's indie film.
This, just as it seems things might get a little brighter when Jim meets Anika at a bar and they hit it off in an offbeat way.LONESOME JIM is, like BUBBLE, one of those movies that tell stories of the mostly forgotten small-town people who live in the Midwest and have either dreams of making it big, have never been to a large city -- let alone a metropolis -- and are caught in a vicious cycle of a dead-end job that offers practically nothing but minimum wage.
Despite the pessimism of several of the characters, it's quite sweet, really, and Mary Kay Place's performance as the ever-positive mother is touching even when her character gets framed for drug-smuggling and she has to smile at Jim's suggestion she read a depressing book.Steve Buscemi proves he can be better behind the screen than in front as well.
In particular, Casey Affleck is quite touching as the lost Jim, and Liv Tyler is absolutely sweet in her role (even when she may be a little too pretty to be a believable small-town girl, I think).
The film's achievement is that, by its end, Lonesome Jim has succeeded in dragging us down into its blubbery depression along with it.
The title character, Jim (Casey Affleck), even kind of looks like the crazed surgical combination of Zach Braff and Jon Heder.
The problem is that he got me to believe in Lonesome Jim's depression.