Hey Ma! Look at me! Er, on second thought-please don't.
It's every 25-year-old screenwriter's dream: get discovered by Harvey Weinstein, sell your script to Miramax and receive full directorial control, a handsome production budget and a record deal for your band to make the soundtrack-all totalling a cool $1 million. Just to sweeten the pot, Weinstein promises to buy you the bar
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where you work. One day you're a bouncer, the next you're above the fold on USA Today. It's enough to go to anyone's head. But imagine the cameras rolling as it all falls apart.
From the opening credits of
Overnight
, documentarians Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith leave no doubt as to what they think of their subject, their once-friend Troy Duffy and his ill-fated film-fame hasn't altered his character as much as brought out the worst in him. In grainy black-and-white, he and his comrades brag about their big plans in the aforementioned bar, pounding back Bushmills and Bud and celebrating, we can already tell, far too prematurely. "I'm Hollywood's new hard-on!" exults Duffy, while the viewer can't help but wince in anticipation of the inevitable de-tumescence. But at first all seems gloriously golden; Montana and Smith decide to make the documentary because of their surety that Duffy is about to hit the big time, and they are promptly rewarded by his Boston-bluecollar-boy-makes-good Matt-and-Ben-scale success story. Initially every actor in Hollywood seems interested in
The Boondock Saints
, from Mark Wahlberg to Patrick Swayze (and, in one improbable readthrough, Paul Reubens).
But after a series of disastrous interpersonal mishaps, Weinstein and Miramax abruptly pull out of the project, at which point Duffy's hubris and deeply entrenched denial kick into overdrive: "They just made the mother of all Miramax fuck-ups…Harvey is going to pay."
Harvey does nothing of the sort, as it happens; instead, by the time Duffy gets
The Boondock Saints
in the can (with Willem Dafoe, Billy Connolly and, of all people, Ron Jeremy), the project has the taint of failure so firmly affixed to it that no distributor will touch it with a bargepole. In the meantime his band meets with similar failure-The Brood's first album ("We'll show them all!") sells a grand total of 690 copies before their label drops them. Throughout everything, Duffy clings to his delusions of grandeur, insisting to his confréres that they're on the verge
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of "making world history," maintaining that the production companies are "scared of us" and "on the run," all evidence to the contrary.
There's something of the vindictive in
Overnight
; Montana and Smith offer a disturbingly stark portrayal of their former associate, his hectoring pep talks ("failure is not an option") and boilermaker-assisted descent into paranoia-a
portrayal which can't help but be colored by the fact that he cut them out of the record deal. They're certainly not sparing with unflattering scenes of a shirtless, out-of-shape Duffy slugging down shots. Not that his meeker bandmates and colleagues come across any better; they tend to get addled and confused when bombarded with Duffy's morass of rhetoric and bombastic nonsense-he's like the bully in high school who repeatedly talks his unwilling friends into things which may very well get them expelled. If there's a moral to be found in
Overnight
, it may only be that when it comes to Tinseltown, as Duffy's agent admits flatly, "Rome's got nothing on us."
