Here is the first teaser for Joaquin Phoenix’s maybe-or-maybe-not mockumentary I’m Still Here, a film that documents Phoenix’s slow descent from the sorta-heights of movie stardom into the shadowy lows of being a mentally unstable Hasidic rapper—or, you know, does it?—by framing it as a heady examination of the nature of fame and its deleterious effects on one’s sense of identity, which forces one to go to selfish, let-a-dude-dump-on-your-chest extremes in order to reclaim it.
Or, in the words of the portentous narration attempting to give metaphorical heft to these images of Phoenix besieged by paparazzi, fighting with hecklers, and finding comfort in the arms of Sean “Diddy” Combs: “That’s you. You’re drops of water, and you’re on top of the mountaintop of success. But one day you start sliding down the mountain and you think ‘Wait a minute, I’m a mountaintop water drop. I don’t belong in this valley, this river, this low, dark ocean with all these drops of water.’ Then one day it gets hot and you slowly evaporate in the air.” You know, we were worried that Joaquin Phoenix's performance art project would end up smothered by its own insufferable self-seriousness, but it turns out we were just drops of water trying to drag him down into our low, dark ocean.