Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #111: Danny Roane: First Time Director (2006)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor or early aughts animated television program. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and I will be writing about the cult animated series Batman Beyond as long as one very generous patron deems necessary. 

And in August, it’s all about Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. COVID-19 and the economic crash have negatively affected my already precarious small business and Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 goes a long way towards keeping this rickety vessel afloat so I want to feature it as aggressively as possible. 

August is Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 month here at the Happy Place. It’s all about the big new Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of The Weird Accordion to Al, The Big Whoop, The Big Squeeze, and Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, the column that brings in the big, big money, or at least keeps us from going out of business imminently.   

We kick off Control Nathan Rabin 4.0’s big month with an exceedingly small movie. Heck, to even call the ramshackle 2006 show-business satire Danny Roane: First Time Director a movie feels a little generous: it’s more like an overachieving home movie. 

In the tradition of such punishingly titled vehicles as Frank McKlusky, C.I., Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector and Larry Gaye: Renegade Male Flight Attendant, Danny Roane: First Time Director casts writer-director Andy Dick as the titular neophyte filmmaker, a self-destructive former sitcom star who is exactly like Andy Dick only he has a different name. 

Dick could win five Academy Awards and find a cure for COVID-19 and his obituary would still refer to him as a “troubled funnyman” in the headline. When your career and persona are as inextricably associated with drug abuse, alcoholism and self-destruction as Dick’s are, you have to do something like, I dunno, become literally the highest-paid actor in the world like Robert Downey Jr. did in order to not be thought of primarily as a professional fuck-up. 

Dick is in no danger of becoming one of our biggest box-office attractions but it nevertheless seems unfair that even if he’s been clean for years, even decades, a public with a short, fuzzy memory is still likely to remember him as a drug addict and alcoholic and not as a talented and distinctive comic performer. 

Once the phrase “troubled” becomes as big a part of your identity as your profession, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to shake that reputation. What do you do when the world won ’t let you forget your mistakes? If you’re Dick, you make a pitch-black joke of your despair and hope that the world will laugh at your pain. 

First time director Andy Dick, who also wrote the screenplay, stars as the title character. Danny Roane was once the popular co-star of a tacky sitcom but his promising career bottomed out when he drunkenly urinated on Jimmy Kimmel and Frankie Muniz during a talk show appearance. 

The troubled comic actor gets sober and after four years on the wagon decides to shift gears and move behind the camera to direct an autobiographical, deeply confusing, pretentious drama about his battle with drug and alcohol abuse starring James Van Der Beek, who stumbled onto a weird second career playing himself in this, the Jay and the Silent Bob franchise (yes, it is a FRANCHISE now, deal with it) and Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23. 

Van Der Beek is wonderfully self-deprecating and exceedingly game, whether he’s confessing that he experienced hard times of his own, and “marijuana was involved” or being the only cast member to defend the director’s choice to turn a pretentious, dodgy arthouse drama into an unwatchable musical, only to be brusquely informed that Anthony Rapp will replace him immediately.

Dick called in a whole lot of favors for a plucky little mockumentary that’s distractingly cheap even for a low-budget independent film. Ben Stiller shows up as himself just long enough to get offended by Dick telling him he looks Jewish. 

The autobiographical drama Dick’s character is making feels a little like Stiller’s own Permanent Midnight, where Dick’s Reality Bites costar played troubled ALF writer/crack addict Jerry Stahl except that Roane’s passion project boasts more fantasy sequences than the average Lord of the Rings sequel. 

Roane is in over his head from the very beginning. His direction seems to consist primarily of encouraging his actors to do everything “blacker”, even his white actors. A director has to be on top of everything, in complete control, and even when Danny is at his best and most functional and sober, he’s still just barely hanging on. 

Then one day he compulsively swigs some alcohol from a bottle his actors are using and in an instant four years of self-discipline and shame and self-control go out the window and the sickness returns with a vengeance. 

The recovering alcoholic becomes a messy drunk all over again. He disappears from the set for three days and returns with an unfortunate determination to transform his painfully personal psychodrama into a musical. 

Danny Roane is every bit as gleefully, deliberately offensive as you would expect from an Andy Dick directorial effort. The R word is thrown around with a careless aggressiveness unusual even for a lowbrow comedy of this sort as part of Dick’s eagerness to push buttons and limits. 

The titles of the scenes for the movie-within-a-movie give a good sense of Danny Roane’s purposefully transgressive tone: “Crack Mom Goes Wrong”, “Another Great Day For Drugs” and “AIDS is not racist.” 

Roane’s incoherent musical somehow gets accepted into a film festival for Jewish woman despite its creator being neither Jewish nor a woman, which proves a decidedly bad fit given Dick, and the movie’s obsessions with Nazis in general and one Nazi in particular, a seriously bad dude named Adolf Hitler whose name and image have long proven irresistible to provocateurs like the film’s writer-director-star. 

Danny Roane: First Time Director ends on a surprisingly downbeat note, with its anti-hero in rehab yet again trying to conquer his demons once and for all. In a melancholy voice filled with pain and regret, he quips darkly that he knows that he’ll succeed at kicking drugs this time because he’s done it a thousand times before. 

It’s a line that’s less funny ha ha than funny true and funny sad. There are moments like that throughout Danny Roane: First Time Director when the shtick and the outrageousness and the deliberate transgression subsides and we get a glimpse of Dick’s authentic struggle as an actor and artist and recovering addict forever shadow-boxing the public’s image of him as a drug casualty.

Danny Roane: First Time Director is barely a movie but it made me laugh as often, and as loudly as genuinely successful comedies thanks to scene-stealing performances from ringers like Jack Black (as himself playing a stoner God) and Bob Odenkirk as a cheerfully idiotic film financier who thinks Roane is pitching him a movie called In a Nutshell when he offers to “nutshell” his movie pitch.

Danny Roane is genuinely funny and unexpectedly poignant in a manner that made me wish Dick had gone for truth rather than a bawdy gag more often, that he trusted silence and sadness instead of reflexively going for cheap, vulgar laughs. 

There’s a deeper, more honest movie hidden somewhere deep within Danny Roane: First Time Director but if Dick’s self-deprecating mockumentary settles for being funny at least it delivers on that level. 

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