If there’s one thing director Paul Weitz (About a Boy) is good at, it’s his affinity for characters on the verge, and in Being Flynn, he’s got two of them. Nick Flynn (Paul Dano) is a directionless young man who’s bunking in a renovated strip club and working part time in a homeless shelter, a bit of a drug addict and a wannabe poet. Jonathan Flynn (Robert De Niro) is his father, also a self-proclaimed great writer who’s never been published (and a part-time cabbie) who abandoned Nick and mom (Julianne Moore) 20 years ago in search of inspiration. Problem is, he never came back—until now that is.
After being kicked out of a cheap rental, father calls son up looking for a place to store his stuff. But after getting his cabbie license further revoked, he winds up at the homeless shelter where Nick works. Soon enough, Jon’s strange, erratic behavior gets Nick into all sorts of trouble (professionally and emotionally), and the film attempts to trace their reconciliation of sorts by way of flashbacks (to explain Nick’s wary tendencies) and their current attempts to be human to one another.
It is hard to sympathize with these two douche bags (plus, you don’t really buy Dano and De Niro as father and son, while Moore is underused in a precious little role), but Weitz’s depiction of New York’s homeless is gritty and heart-tugging at times. De Niro gamely revisits a down-and-out character that he did so well in early classics like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, but this elderly incarnation lacks conviction. That said, we blame the real Nick Flynn, author of the autobiographical Another B.S. Night in Suck City that the film is based on, for the film’s overall heavy-handedness. Watchable it may be, but the material is far too morose, detached and self-centered to be truly interesting.