Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero goes from one extreme to the other. It’s the first movie to show how good an actor Robert Downey Jr. can be, but it also features the incredibly bland acting of Andrew McCarthy. It’s based on Bret Easton Ellis’s debut novel, which is full of nasty little vignettes about rich kids partying, doing drugs, and becoming victims of sex trafficking, but the movie feels like an anti-drugs after school special. It has an incredible soundtrack and lush, neon ‘80s visuals that lure me into watching it over and over again, but it always leaves me frustrated by its trite, unsatisfying story. It takes a book about the emptiness of extreme privilege and turns it into a soap opera about three friends dealing with the tragic consequences of one young man’s addiction.

The movie starts at a high school graduation. These are super rich Beverly Hills kids, and when the commencement speaker wishes them good health, prosperity, and happiness, one of them screams, “We want money!” After the ceremony, Clay, played by Andrew McCarthy, his girlfriend Blair, played by Jami Gertz, and their friend Julian, played by Robert Downey Jr., pose for a picture that becomes a freeze frame. And you just know you’ll be seeing this photo again because that’s the kind of cliché this movie loves.

Six months later, Clay gets a voicemail from Blair begging him to come back from college to help her deal with Julian. As he listens, he remembers everything that happened the last few months. He and Blair had planned to move away together, but she said she was staying in LA to model instead. He condescendingly shouted at her, “Modeling? Why don’t you try something a little more challenging? Like being a game show host. We need more game show hosts.” She admitted she wasn’t leaving because she was afraid. Julian, who planned to stay in LA to go into business with his dad, dropped Clay off at the airport, and Clay told him to look after Blair for him. But when Clay returned for Thanksgiving, he caught Blair and Julian in bed together. Heartbroken, he threw the flowers he’d brought at them and asked her, “How much time did it take for you to fuck my best friend, huh?” Now he has to go back to help the two people who just betrayed him.

Back in the present, Clay drives around LA to The Bangles’s awesome cover of ”Hazy Shade of Winter.” Both the book and movie are from his point of view, but unlike the book, where Clay drifts through debaucherous parties and Blair and Julian are just secondary characters, the movie’s focus is Julian. With this cast, that’s the right choice, since a dark drama carried by Andrew McCarthy would make this flimsy story feel even more like a tired soap opera than it already is. Robert Downey Jr. seemed to draw from his real-life addiction issues to create an incredibly raw and vulnerable character spiraling out of control. In contrast, McCarthy plays Clay just like his character in Pretty in Pink: a cute but spineless pretty boy. That worked well in a teen romance, but here he’s in a world with hardcore drug use, violence, and forced prostitution.

Clay pulls up to a party at a giant mansion decorated entirely in pink and with walls of boxy TVs everywhere. Rip, a drug dealer played by James Spader with slicked-back hair, slinks up to him and tries to entice him with drugs. Clay refuses, so Rip tells him that Blair’s upstairs. Clay goes upstairs, where it’s quieter and decorated with ice and igloos, and finds her. Jami Gertz delivers most of her lines in a weird, stilted manner that feels unnatural, but could be intentional since her character is usually on coke or coming down from it while navigating her thorny relationships with her recent ex-boyfriend and the friend she cheated with.

When Clay and Blair see each other for the first time since Thanksgiving, they’re understandably awkward. He seems to want to continue their romantic relationship, but she keeps changing the subject to Julian. Still hurt by the betrayal, especially from his best friend, Clay acts like he doesn’t care about him. Or maybe he does care and is pretending not to. It’s hard to tell what McCarthy is trying to convey. Blair talks about the fun times they had in high school and says they both missed him. When she asks if he missed her, he emphatically says yes, all the time.

Clay finds Julian outside by the pool, drunk, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. When Clay acts cold, Julian asks if he’s still angry. Clay says no, and Julian calls him a liar. After spotting Rip, Julian scurries away.

Later, Julian and Blair are both wasted and beg Clay to party with them. He drives them around in his convertible, Julian in the middle with his legs in the air, twiddling his feet and singing Christmas songs. But the mood changes when he almost falls out of the car and Clay and Blair have to pull him back in.

They go to a quiet restaurant where Julian flirts with some women while Blair tells Clay what’s been going on. Julian’s business with his dad fell apart, so he borrowed money from Rip, spent it all on drugs, fought with his dad, and got kicked out of the house. Later, at a club, Rip confronts Julian about the $50,000 he owes him. Julian says he’ll have it soon.

Blair dances flirtatiously for Clay, but when she tries to get him to join her, he refuses. So she sits down with him and apologizes. He says it doesn’t matter anymore. She explains that she and Julian hooked up because they were both lonely. Clay again says it doesn’t matter, forget it. When she keeps talking about Julian, Clay says, “It’s funny, when you called me, I thought I was coming home to see you.”

Clay’s first night back lays out exactly who these characters are. He and Blair hook up again, but things are tense whenever Julian comes up. Julian continues his downward spiral, trying and failing to get money from his rich relatives, stealing from friends, and ultimately prostituting himself to pay off his debt to Rip. He has a final, heartfelt conversation with his dad, who agrees to help if Julian can stay clean for a week. Meanwhile, when they’re not partying and having sex in private and public, Clay and Blair try to track down Julian. They finally find him at one of Rip’s parties about to have sex with a man and drag him out of there.

Throughout all this, nobody changes, nobody has a character arc, everyone is locked into their roles in relation to the drug addict. Julian’s dad sets clear boundaries with his out of control son while showing he loves him and wants to help. Blair is an enabler: she parties with him, helps him detox, believes him when he promises it’s the last time, and then repeats the cycle. Rip is a predator, selling drugs to Julian until he’s hooked, loaning him money when he’s broke, then demanding repayment by pimping him out so he can continue to profit off of him.

But while Rip is obviously the most villainous character, I find Clay the most reprehensible. Rip’s doing what predators do, and James Spader plays him like a shark, not sociopathic, just taking what he needs. Clay, on the other hand, takes what he wants and ignores the rest, regardless of how it affects his friends. Even though he can’t get past what happened between Blair and Julian, he starts sleeping with her again. He still resents her, mocks her career, and gets annoyed whenever she brings up Julian’s problems, even though she’s right about how serious they are. Even though they’ve been best friends for years, he’s still very cold to Julian. He follows Blair as she tries to track him down and lamely threatens Rip to leave him alone, but Rip isn’t intimidated by him at all. When they find Julian passed out with a gun in his lap, Blair takes care of him for hours while Clay hangs back uselessly. Worst of all, when he sees Julian at his lowest, forced to have sex for money, he calls him a whore and accuses him of always running away, even though Clay keeps saying he’s going to get out of LA as soon as he can. 

Things play out the way you’d expect. Clay and Blair rescue Julian from Rip. Julian gushes to them about how he doesn’t deserve their friendship. Clay drives until the sun comes up while Blair and Julian sleep. Julian slumps over onto Clay, who pushes him off, and Julian’s head falls back hard. Clay pulls over and realizes Julian is dead. Blair wakes up, and they cry over him.

At the cemetery, Clay tells Blair about when they were five, Julian’s mom died and he sat by the phone for days, waiting for her to call, until his dad sent him a telegram pretending to be from her telling Julian that she’d died and gone to heaven. Clay says he was a tough little kid. It takes Julian dying for Clay to feel real sympathy for him. He says he’s leaving town the next day and wants her to come with him. She agrees. The movie ends with the shot of their graduation photo then fades to credits.

Ellis’s nihilistic novel about incredibly rich, drug-addicted kids in 1980s Beverly Hills was changed into a more palatable story about a tragic young man who falls victim to drugs despite his friends’ efforts. But where the book leaves a haunting impression of how vapid and self-destructive these privileged people are, the movie keeps you at a distance, making you think, couldn’t be me.

We’re in Clay’s point of view in both the book and the movie, but the perspective shifts from book Clay, a passive participant, to movie Clay, a moralizing scold. Blair is a codependent enabler and Rip is a predatory dealer, but Clay wasn’t even there when Julian lost control. Clay acts like he’s the real victim, betrayed by the woman he loved with his best friend. With this shift, we’re encouraged to judge Julian along with Clay, who, after seeing him at his lowest, tells him, “You look like a fucking whore to me.”

Clay’s not all bad. It makes sense that he can’t forgive Blair and Julian right away. Sometimes an addict like Julian can’t be saved, especially not by an enabler like Blair, who’s always there to clean him up as he detoxes and cuddle him when he promises it won’t happen again. But Clay does nothing but push him away and criticize him. When your supposed best friend is self-destructing, the least you can do is show him some compassion. You can predict where a guy like Clay will end up. A white guy who wears a suit and tie to Beverly Hills parties, never touches drugs, and judges his addict friend isn’t going to help anyone but himself.

VERDICT: GUILTY