Jeff Daniels wrote and stars in Guest Artist, a comic two-hander about a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright drinking his way through an 18-year-old writer’s block. The playwright has sunk to accepting a guest residency from a Lima, Ohio, amateur theater company. He shows up drunk, bitter and entitled, and, of course, he hasn’t written the play that has been commissioned. His appointed Man Friday is a wannabe playwright (newcomer Thomas Macias) who desperately tries to handle the raging ego and the self-destructive behavior of his idol.
[MILD SPOILER HERE] It turns out that the writers’ block stems from a self-suppression of artistic expression. But there really isn’t any humor or insight into the artistic process that we haven’t seen before.
Jeff Daniels is very good as the frustrated genius. Daniels has been a cinema star for a long time, and for good reason. It’s been 34 years since he broke through with his star turn in Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo, and he’s beloved for roles ranging from those in the Dumb and Dumber movies and television’s The Newsroom. I most admire Daniels’ performance as professor-turned-battlefield-commander Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in Gettysburg (1993).
Guest Artist is essentially a filmed play, and it looks like it. For some, a dose of Jeff Daniels will be enough.