But it starts off with a glimpse of James at a party, shirtless, tattooed, and high, eventually falling off a balcony in the incident that will have him shipped off to seek help. A Million Little Pieces takes place almost entirely on the grounds of the Minnesota facility that James checks into at the behest of his brother Bob (Charlie Hunnam). Other times, the film seems to sincerely see him as cool, as he sprawls on the couch in the rehab common room with a cigarette dangling from his lips, or takes his rage out on a young tree, or does some forbidden flirting with a fellow patient named Lilly (Odessa Young). That character, who’s named James Frey, is played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson with a tough veneer that’s only sometimes positioned as a defensive façade. The two otherwise approach their adaptation on the level, and the result is an underwhelming addiction story that feels not just familiar, but more focused on the bad-boy swagger of its main character than his actual recovery.

But the film, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson ( Fifty Shades of Grey) from a screenplay she wrote with her husband and lead actor, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, doesn’t do anything interesting with the book’s history beyond gesture to it with an opening quote - “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened” - that’s misattributed to Mark Twain. Dealing with source material that probably wouldn’t have made as big a splash if it hadn’t been positioned as a real, raw story poses some interesting dilemmas when it comes to adaptation. According to Waithe, Frey introduced himself to her at a party, and pitched the idea as one “he couldn’t write himself because he’s white.” She ran with it, building out the plot and writing the script herself, but giving him a story credit.Īnd now a big-screen version of the book that made Frey famous, then infamous, is out in theaters, well over a decade after the furor surrounding it died down. Then this fall, Frey, of all people, was revealed to have come up with the concept for Queen & Slim, Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe’s take on Bonnie and Clyde as seen through a lens of racialized police violence. He started a company in 2010 with the manifest goal of churning out books that could be developed into adaptations like I Am Number Four, which starred Alex Pettyfer as a hunky alien, Frey’s predicted next big YA thing after wizards and vampires. In the years since the author was exposed as having fictionalized swaths of his supposedly true best seller A Million Little Pieces, he’s been kicking around the edges of Hollywood. This awards season’s strangest bit player has been disgraced memoirist James Frey.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as James Frey in A Million Little Pieces.

A million pieces book