A lesson on how to waste one's life

Pinero

Rating: * * (out of 5)
Director: Leon Ichaso
Running time: 103 minutes
Language: English
Opens Jan. 31

One pitfall of artist biopics is the genre's tendency to select those artists whose lives were of the wrecked and splashy variety. It's extremely rare to find films about stable, even-tempered, family-loving citizens who also happened to be artists. The norm is that artists are talented but self-destructive and arrogant problem-people, hell on friends and family but deserving of adoration for exactly those traits that set them apart from the humdrum bourgeois.

While it's fine to go along with this to some extent, it's problematic when the personality overrides and obscures the art. As novelist Nelson Algren once remarked, artists should be judged for their work and not for sleeping around or taking drugs.

The best artist biopics blur the distinction between the artist's life and their output ("Frida," "Amadeus"), reminding us of how intertwined the two are, and of the process by which the artist alchemizes the pain and disaster of his or her life.