Another fucked-up childhood gets the big-screen treatment in this irreverent and highly stylised black comedy based on Augusten Burroughs' bestselling US memoir. Marking the feature-writing/directing debut of Nip/Tuck exec producer Ryan Murphy, it's a surreal and mordantly amusing tale of parental abandonment, insanity and the most eccentric foster family since The Royal Tenenbaums.
Annette Bening is entertainingly monstrous as a narcissistic wannabe poet who's convinced by a shrink (Brian Cox) to place her adoring son Augusten (Joseph Cross) into his seriously unconventional guardianship. What follows is a rambling patchwork of laugh-out-loud scenes, in which juicily idiosyncratic characters - including Cox's cat-killing daughter Gwyneth Paltrow and his dog-snack-eating wife Jill Clayburgh - camouflage the absence of both narrative structure and emotional depth with their wacko antics. It's only in the downbeat final third that the film's drifting becomes noticeable, but even the darkest moments can't blunt the razor-sharp dialogue.
*Out 19 January
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