The famous paparazzi shot of Keanu Reeves sitting alone on a bench spawned “sad Keanu”; this comedy gives us “sad asshole Keanu”. It’s a Hollywood in-joke, in a film written and directed by Jonah Hill who has persuaded his actor mates to appear, including Reeves, who plays Reef Hawk, one of the most well-known actors in the world. Like Reeves, he has a reputation for being Hollywood’s nicest celebrity: kind, humble, possibly vegan. But under the saintly exterior, Reef is a narcissist recovering from a messy heroin addiction, which has been covered up for years by his crisis lawyer Ira (played by Hill with a shaved head and terrifying veneers).
The plot is a whodunnit without a body. Reef is being extorted by persons unknown who claim to have a video of him in a compromising situation. Ira tries to work out what’s in the video (“Have you ever killed anyone? I’m not a judgy person.”) Hill’s dialogue is straight from Hollywood’s inner sanctum, and his script, co-written with Ezra Woods, is frequently though not consistently hilarious. At the bidding of his lawyer, Reef sets off to apologise to everyone he’s ever wronged and to sniff out the blackmailer. His two best friends from high school, played by Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer, tag along.
The moral of the story is that being rich and famous hasn’t made Reef happy. He spends his free time Googling himself (“Reef Hawk bad person”), and at times the script seems to invite us to feel bad for the loneliness and pain of the pampered and overprivileged. It might perhaps have been more ruthless. The movie ends on a bit of a flat note too, with personal growth where you might have hoped for a murder, or at the very least a public humiliation.
Still the performances are unfailingly entertaining: Laverne Cox as a women’s rights lawyer, Drew Barrymore as herself and Martin Scorsese, movingly, as a washed-up talent manager. Incidentally, Ira has a picture of Kanye West on his wall as the poster child for coming back from being cancelled.