Gus Van Sant is at his best when he points his camera at those on the outskirts of society, be they Good Will Hunting’s sharp-tongued janitor who happens to be a math genius, Drugstore Cowboy’s quartet of pharmacy-robbing addicts, or Milk’s gay politician fighting for LGBT rights from San Francisco City Hall.
That’s precisely why the filmmaker is a perfect fit to tell the story of John Callahan, the quadriplegic Portland cartoonist whose work was marked by shaky lines and a giddy dismissal of tact. One famous Callahan comic features two klansmen in full regalia: “Don’t you love it,” one asks, “when they’re still warm from the dryer?”
According to Van Sant, the Callahan biopic Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot has been waiting in the wings for years, ever since Robin Williams reached out to the director in the 1990s for help turning Callahan’s memoir into a film. Dusted off following Williams’s untimely death in 2014, Don’t Worry secured Joaquin Phoenix to play Callahan and snagged some financing from Amazon, and now, the finished product is here.