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.
It wouldn’t be fair to ask what happened to Crudup – then having a hell of a year 2000 between this and Almost Famous – or Maclean. They’ve both worked steadily over the past 25 years, Crudup in largely supporting roles and Maclean as a director of television. But it was Jack Black, who was having a great year of his own with High Fidelity already in theaters, who went from Jesus’ Son ensemble player to much bigger things. In retrospect, it feels like Jesus’ Son should have been a bigger breakthrough for both its star and its director – especially Maclean, who nails the tone of Johnson’s writing without making it into a book on tape. She keeps the movie loose without fraying it beyond accessibility. Like Crudup, she makes a lot of strange things seem like a part of life (which of course they are).
Audiences didn’t necessarily recognize it, however. Jesus’ Son grossed less than multiple limited-run rereleases of old movies, and never played on more than 90 screens. Somehow, at some point, one of those screen was at since-closed mall theater in Amsterdam, New York, where some buddies and I drove 40 minutes to see it in the summer of 2000. It seems like the kind of place one of the movie’s characters might stumble into the movie, had they survived into the year 2000 (and, appropriately, online sources claim this theater was actually closed by the time we saw Jesus’ Son there, like a less poetic version of Johnson’s image, reproduced in the film, of an abandoned drive-in showing a movie to an empty lot in the winter. Anyway, in 2025 these characters would probably catch it on Tubi, which is exactly where it currently streams). The indie hits and buzz-generators of 2000 largely seemed to exist on two poles: the elderly-friendly crowdpleasers like Chocolat, Billy Elliot, and Small Time Crooks (not technically an indie release, but at the time Woody Allen’s biggest and mildest movie in years) on one end, and bracing works of bleakness like Dancer in the Dark and fellow heroin-addiction drama Requiem for a Dream on the other.
Jesus’ Son didn’t really fit with either group, and never really joined Requiem or Trainspotting on the drug-movie dorm-poster line-up, either. That makes sense; its technique is less outwardly dazzling than those two (and, for that matter, less direct in actually discussing the ins and outs of drug use and abuse, too). It feels like a shambling hangover from youth culture, not the kind of self-destruction that’s near-impossible to avoid glamorizing, no matter how gritty it gets. Yet Jesus’ Son might also be a better movie than Requieum, less virtuosic but also less pummeling and maybe, in that way, more empathetic. The danger of Fuckhead’s drug use is how compatible it is with his life on the margins, and, for all its possible horrors, how gently it’s able to nudge him further out. The movie’s final bit of narration, where Fuckhead alludes to moving on from the stable job we see him in, hints at the impermanence of all things, experienced soberly or not. The movie’s quiet hope seems to be that Fuckhead might find a different way to surrender to it.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.
