An excruciatingly heartfelt performance from Patton Oswalt carries this high-concept indie picture from writer-director James Morosini. It’s a film that genuinely does take the comedy of embarrassment to a new level. Morosini says that it’s based on a real incident in his own life; I can believe it. You couldn’t make it up. There is a stranger-than-fiction authenticity to the whole horrifying mess, in which Morosini cleverly uses real home-movie footage of his own childhood. The final 15 minutes have to be watched through your fingers.
Oswalt plays a well-meaning but weak and foolish guy called Chuck who has been a terrible husband (he’s now divorced) and a terrible deadbeat dad, having let his son down all his life. The son is twentysomething Franklin, played by Morosini, who is in treatment for depression and living with his mom Diane (Amy Landecker). Infuriated by the way his deeply unreliable and whiny dad is never there for him, Franklin refuses to take his calls and blocks him on social media. And so in desperate despair, Chuck fakes the online profile of an attractive young woman to contact his son – “catfish” him, essentially – and stay in touch, using the photograph of a local diner waitress called Becca (Claudia Sulewski).
