Austin Film Festival review: Lane Michael Stanley’s ADDICT NAMED HAL probes beneath the banality of addiction

The movie title “Addict Named Hal” would seem to indicate the protagonist of the story, but in Lane Michael Stanley’s debut feature, it serves a different purpose. The story here actually focuses on Amy (Natalie L’Amoreaux), a 21 year-old who can’t believe she’s an alcoholic. Despite crashing the car twice. Whisked off to rehab by her mother, she initially finds it to be a fairly typical housemate situation, though she’s shocked to learn that everyone working there is an addict too. In a weird way, it feels like Rogue entering the X-Men mansion, in reverse: instead of special abilities, each individual has their own substance-specific disease.

Hal (Ray Roberts II) seems like one of the most functional addicts there, even though he just did a stint in jail for an old warrant. Newly promoted to deputy in charge, he talks a good game. He’s also young, good-looking, and instantly desirable to Amy, who herself looks like a young, blonde Winona Ryder. But while hot people hooking up is usually fun for moviegoers to watch, it’s well-documented bad news for addicts newly in treatment.

Big studio movies have a tendency to make drug addiction into something so dark and evil it verges on caricature. Think Jennifer Connolly using the double-ended sex toy for extra bucks in Requiem for a Dream, or Chris Rock shaking and crying as he hits the crack pipe in New Jack City. But so many addicts never have a rock-bottom that dramatic. Addict Named Hal gets this. Drugs are taken in generic, suburban houses late at night, and the shoplifting and petty crime to support them isn’t that difficult. It’s just soul-numbing, and body destroying, but in ways that seem acceptable in the surface until they aren’t.

At Amy’s first meeting, one of the speakers says that eventually, if you’re in rehab enough, you’ll hear your own story. Which is true, and yet also not. Addiction stories have enough commonalities that one will always come around that’s close enough, and yet everyone must process their own issue individually. Although admittedly a lot do it in part by smoking, the one rehab-approved addiction (besides, perhaps, caffeine) that, while still fatal, usually doesn’t turn users into dangerous, desperate fiends.

No trippy effects are needed to demonstrate the high here. Stanley makes effective use of a light-up fidget spinner to tell the tale in one scene, and plays a bit with sound design to incite a withdrawal-induced panic attack. The viewer may go in wondering, like Amy, if she’s just a typical excessive teen or a for-real sober house candidate, but the story progression leaves no doubt. She means well, but her needs and her judgment are well and truly screwed.

Stanley’s script remains agnostic over treatment efficacy. At its most optimistic, it suggest that having someone else to live for is the key to surviving the rest. At the other end, it implicitly criticizes the zero-tolerance mindset which says that even a sip of booze is such a failure that, well, shit, a person might as well fail in a blaze of glory and do heroin at the same time.

To a certain degree, addiction stories follow certain tropes, but the best of them make us forget that’s what they’re doing. Addict Named Hal features at least one genuine plot swerve, one that works because the movie is playing true to its characters rather than forcing them into a story. We know that where the characters end up can’t be great, but just not the particulars of how bad it might get. As in real life, never assume that because the surroundings are nice the characters can’t find sufficient darkness inside.

Roberts and L’Amoreaux both give impressive breakthrough performances here. Great acting is often praised for being honest, but what they manage is perhaps harder – being actively dishonest with themselves in a way that feels real. If you’ve ever encountered an addict’s self-justifications – or made them yourself – it can be like looking into a (really attractive) reflection.

The title of the movie, in the end, plays as a warning. Don’t become a statistic defined by your worst weakness. But if you plan on outlasting it, don’t deny it either.