Based on a true story, "Permanent Midnight" stars Ben Stiller as a Jerry Stahl, a successful television writer whose life is wrecked by a severe drug addiction. Despite a good performance by Stiller, "Permanent Midnight" is a thin film. The life of a writer and the world of an addict are superficially skimmed over, and the factors which lead to Stahl's compulsions are all but ignored. History is filled with writers (Bukowski, Burroughs, Kerouac etc) suffering from addictions, but director David Veloz never cares to ask "why?". Too in love with style and surfaces, "Permanent Midnight" only dives into the head of its protagonist in its last act, when a now clean Stahl attempts to forge relationships with both a fellow detox survivor (Maria Bello) and his young daughter. Owen Wilson co-stars.7/10 – See instead "In A Lonely Place", "Half Nelson", "Henry Fool", "Auto Focus", "Mishima" and "Contempt".

Most of the drug-use scenes were fairly realistic. Been there and back myself, so to tell you the truth, nothing I saw in the movie made me wince, although there was a lot to relate to. There's a scene where - this really isn't a spoiler, given the context of the movie - where Jerry dumps some pills out of a prescription bottle, and they look exactly like the kind of pills they're supposed to be. Nice attention to detail. One thing that movies never quite get right or, perhaps like this one, simply choose to ignore, are the details of how one actually turns one's life around from being addicted to recovering, and this movie was no exception. We know in the beginning that Jerry has been through rehab, but that process itself, which may I say ain't exactly a cakewalk - and I mean you have to be clean before you can go through it, remains rather mysterious. Oh well, whatever, an interesting, entertaining movie that held my interest for its running time. Some usage scenes might be a bit upsetting to the non-anointed, although probably nothing quite so hard to take as in Requiem For A Dream.

The trials and tribulations of a junkie TV writer: but who cares? And Ben Stiller in sex scenes with attractive women? I don't think so. Well, Bello and Hurley aren't exactly prime beauties, but for Stiller they're goddesses. This ugly little runt, though not a bad actor, should play nothing else but ugly little runts. Logical. The movie has some of that "casual-flow" dialogue but it comes off all wrong and too forced; a shtick used much better by its more-or-less inventors, Altman and Allen. There isn't really that much going on in this mediocre, forgettable movie; certainly some humour could have done it some good. The movie ultimately has a very tired point to make: "just say no". I have a better one: "just say no to Stiller in a sex scene".

If you don't have a main character the audience can sympathize with, if you handle the photography as if you were rushing through a cheap television show, then having a great cast is irrelevant. About three quarters of the way through, I lost interest and turned it off. Requiem for a Dream this is not. Requiem, though very painful to watch, was quite creatively put together, with gut wrenching performances, and characters we could hope for, even though we knew all too well just where they were going. Permanent Midnight is boring and flat, more from technique than material. Too bad. I really like Ben Stiller but a good performance on his part just wasn't enough.