Holy Crap this movie is out there. I mean after all, it’s meant to be based on one guy’s real life story and if ANYONE has lived this life, they deserve a Nobel Peace Prize!

If it sounds like some tame Weird Al Jankovic comedy thing, you’re way off. It’s a hip, period drama set in the mid 70s about a young effeminite boys painful childhood. His narcissistic mum is obsessed with becoming a famed poet. But let’s face it what poets are famous in their life time, let alone rich or admired? As his mum slips further into her psyhosis, her relationship with her alcholic husband detereorates. At a tender young age when a boy needs at least one strong role model, his family is falling apart.

They seek marriage counselling, with a psychiatrist. Which soon lapses into treatment of the mother. Eventually they divorce, but as the mum becomes junked up on the valium of the time, our main man is forced to move in with his mum’s pyschiatrist. His dad completely abandons him. He’s barely a teenager.

His pychiatrist pseudo parent lives in a psychedelic trash pile of a mansion that looked like The Greatful Dead partied there with the Manson Family. The only constant is total and utter dysfunction. The psychiatrist is a nearly retired mirror image of Freud, who’s tremendously caring, but verging on insane. He’s adopted three other patient’s kids, one of whom is played by Gwenyth Paltrow, range from the sublimely cool to the ridiculously neurotic.

Life only gets more twisted through the main character’s teens. He becomes gay, after starting a relationship with his skitzophrenic step-brother. Also finding out that his other siblings have equally been dumped by their parents. His mum becomes a lesbian and slips further into complete and utter insanity, till the point that she’s institutionalised.

Somehow, despite everything, both the main character lives through it all, and the movie has laugh out loud moments. Annette Benning put in a stellar performance as the insane mum. She starts out as the beautiful, hip 70s supermum that rapidly looses her mind, progressively becoming more disceveled as the movie goes on. For kitsch fans, you will love this movie, because the seventiesness is piled on in spades!

It is however a bizarre, at times frightening movie, not for the faint hearted. There’s genuine psycosis on display, suicide, rage and people being institutionalised against their will. At times it’s a harrowing reminder that for the mentally ill, you can be treated, but you never get well. You just stay a little more sane.

Four out of five stars :).