All the world's a stage, literally, in Zhang Yang's ambitious and deeply flawed Quitting, a meta-movie that covers the lost years of actor Jia Hongshen, who reenacts a painful period of drug addiction and schizophrenia along with many of the real-life players involved. Though Jia's motivation for tearing off old scabs is never made clear, the end effect seems contradictory and false, simultaneously getting closer to the truth through re-creation and getting farther away through performance. Zhang's modernist experiment has been tried before, most notably in Abbas Kiarostami's Close Up, but the irony of having actors (and non-professionals) play themselves is that they don't always look comfortable in their own skin. By taking one step away from reality, everything starts to look false. But as failures go, Quitting represents a quantum leap forward after the forced whimsy of Zhang's 2000 comedy Shower, and it places him among the emerging stars of China's Sixth Generation. The film opens with a "Where Are They Now?" documentary sequence in which interview subjects wonder why Jia, the promising young star of genre pictures and avant-garde theater, suddenly receded from public view. Flash back to 1995, when the dramatized action finds Jia's rural parents (Jia Fengsen and Chai Xiuling) moving into his Beijing apartment to help him recover from the addiction that's plagued him since he starred in Zhang's 1993 stage production of Kiss Of The Spider Woman. Jia's parents initially meet with nothing but discouragement, as their sullen son lashes out at their "peasant" manners and lures his alcoholic father into downing large bottles of beer. As Jia's drug problems persist, his mental health declines to such an extent that he begins imagining himself as John Lennon's son, which lands him in an asylum for an indefinite period. At numerous points throughout Quitting, usually during some dramatic epiphany, Zhang yanks out the rug, pulling the camera back on the soundstage as a reminder that the action can't be accepted at face value. Whether seen as group therapy or mere exhibitionism, the family's willingness to dramatize these wrenching feelings adds a deeper layer to the story, which otherwise follows in the familiar arc of celebrities spiraling into abusive and narcissistic drug addicts. (See also: Permanent Midnight or Hurlyburly.) Because Quitting admits its basic falsehood up front, the film is never emotionally affecting, but Jia's participation in this confrontation of his past shows remarkable courage and honesty, especially when his behavior doesn't inspire much sympathy. His four years in limbo were a rocky, difficult sprawl, so Zhang's daring treatment follows in kind.