Jesus’ Son at 25: A Better Drug Addiction Movie from the Year 2000 Than Requiem for a Dream

Almost everything Fuckhead does feels like he’s experiencing it for the first time, second time tops, like he’s doing his best to acclimate himself to routines he may have only faintly understood. The lead character – “hero” would be too strong a word – of Jesus’ Son, played by Billy Crudup, describes himself as having moved around a lot, in the context of an 18-month stay constituting the longest he’s ever lived someplace. He says it so casually that it might take a moment to register how strange this is for an adult no longer subjected to the whims of a family (and certainly not subjected to the whims of even nomadic employment). After spending a day tearing copper wire out of an abandoned house with local drunk and fellow heroin addict Wayne (Denis Leary), Fuckhead describes in narration the deep satisfaction taken from attaining “the feeling of men who had worked.” Later – or earlier? The film’s chronology is intentionally but not intricately scrambled – he has a job as a hospital orderly, which he performs as if it’s his first day and his training has been interrupted.
Billy Crudup was in his early thirties when he made Jesus’ Son, and part of the brilliance of his performance is how he’s able to create such a believable haze around Fuckhead, including his age: His real name is never given, his background is never explored, and even at the end of the movie, his future seems uncertain. Apart from the soundtrack, the movie doesn’t always feel particularly keyed to its early-1970s setting; the title refers to a line from the Velvet Underground song “Heroin,” but these midwest landscapes don’t feel connected to Lou Reed’s New York or any kind of real countercultural offshoot. This is not a failure to evoke another time, but rather a reflection of characters who seem out of step and disconnected. Crudup makes that sensibility feel weirdly timeless and natural, right down to his halting reading of the film’s sometime narration.
The narration is adapted from particularly memorable lines out of the source material, a book of connected short stories by Denis Johnson. If Jesus’ Son wasn’t based on Johnson’s work, it might seem suffocatingly affected, with its oddball vignettes full of half-pontificating addicts and dirtbags, and a lead character in danger of too-pure-for-this-world bullshit. But 25 years after its commercial release, the stock of bit players like Michael Shannon and Miranda July having skyrocketed since, Alison Maclean’s film has stayed just the right size, and an unusually non-leering portrayal of drug abuse. Fuckhead stumbles into heroin addiction when he falls in love with Michelle (Samantha Morton), who asks him if he’s ever seen someone shoot up before. He has not. Soon it becomes part of his routine, such as it is. His relationship with Michelle, brought to life with sometimes-frightening intensity by Morton, is tumultuous but not without its advantages in such a transient life. In a sequence that Maclean shoots with split-screen, we see Fuckhead and Wayne overdose simultaneously. Michelle turns up and revives Fuckhead. Wayne dies – or it seems that way – and the film moves on.