Don Peyote

He’s won a Tony Award on stage, for 2005’s The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, but Dan Fogler’s film career has been defined chiefly by crass and/or live-wire best friend roles, in movies like Good Luck Chuck, Fanboys and Take Me Home Tonight. A wild-eyed, barrel-chested bundle of energy loosely in the mold of a Chris Farley, he’s the guy (along with Josh Gad, whom he lost out to on a starring role in the forthcoming HBO biopic of Sam Kinison) who gets the offers that five to seven years ago were going to Jack Black and Zach Galifianakis.
Naturally, though, as with many a true creative type, Fogler has chafed a bit at this limited vision of his talents. He’s delved into some indie productions over the past several years, to sometimes very engaging effect, as with Kevin and Michael Goetz’s Scenic Route, penned by Kyle Killen. He also apparently watched a bunch of the History Channel’s Mayan prophecy programming and surveyed the viral mania rampant in the culture at large to inform his second effort behind the camera, and as whacked-out a passion project as one is likely to see this calendar year, Don Peyote.
Co-written and co-directed by Fogler and Michael Canzoniero, the movie—a ramshackle vision quest in which post-millennial societal anxiety gets put into a blender along with trace elements of Circle of Iron, After Hours, Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Fisher King and Timothy Leary—stars Fogler as apple-bong enthusiast Warren Allman, a 33-year-old graphic novelist and “man of few ambitions and no radical passions” who lives in New York City with his fiancée Karen (Kelly Hutchinson). Already a bit nervous about his upcoming nuptials, Warren freaks out after he bumps into an end-of-days street preacher, and becomes obsessed with making a documentary about … well, things, man—like the consolidation of wealth and power, the evolved “Homo Sanctus” and the possible approaching apocalypse. Warren recruits his friend, Balance (Yang Miller), to the project, but after he starts huffing ayahuasca and other psychedelic drugs, it’s not long before he’s the one wearing a rope belt.