Listen Up Philip

Alex Ross Perry’s third feature heralds the arrival of a bold new voice in American movies. Even more than in his critically lauded The Color Wheel, Perry draws on literary models (mainly Philip Roth and William Gaddis) to achieve a brazen mixture of bitter humor and unexpected pathos. In this sly, very funny portrait of artistic egomania, Jason Schwartzman stars as Philip Lewis Friedman, a precocious literary star anticipating the publication of his second novel. Philip is a caustic narcissist, but the film, shot with tremendous agility on Super-16mm by Sean Price Williams, leaves his orbit frequently, lingering on the perspectives of his long-suffering photographer girlfriend, Ashley, (Elisabeth Moss) and his hero, the Roth-like literary lion Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), who himself considers Philip a major talent. A film about callow ambition, Listen Up Philip is itself remarkably poised, a knowing, rueful account of how pain and insecurity transfigure themselves as anger but also as art.

Official Selection, New York Film Festival
Special Jury Prize, Locarno Film Festival
Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival

"[A] gaspingly funny exploration of art and life, men and women, being and nonbeing, and the power and limits of language." —Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“I can't think of a recent movie that stages with as much joy and wonder the sense of living a life that becomes, directly or obliquely, in action or in idea, the stuff of art.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker