SWEET DREAMS (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Sweet Dreams, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 11, 2024

Sweet Dreams gives us two stories. One is rough and honest, and the other is the stuff of pure formula. Writer/director Lije Sarki has the right idea with the first part, especially given the subject matter of this movie.

It's about a man, an alcoholic who hits what he finally determines to be rock bottom, who enters a recovery group home. That man, named Morris, is played by Johnny Knoxville, who famously—or infamously, depending on one's perspective—is best known for being a stunt performer before becoming a pretty fine actor in his own right. It's worth bringing up Knoxville's career, if only because so many of his TV and movie stunt shows incorporated plenty of booze to fuel or encourage the performance.

When we first see his character awakens on a park bench in his underwear and with a bloodied face, it seems like a joke at first, as if the actor has found himself in a rather embarrassing and painful state after doing something dangerous. There's nothing funny, though, about the way Morris pleads with a woman walking her dog to let him borrow her phone so that he can call his daughter.

Morris has messed up bad—worse than he ever has in what we eventually learn is a long history of drunken, potentially dangerous behavior. His ex-partner won't answer his calls, but she does leave a voicemail, stating plainly that she will never allow him to see their daughter again if she has anything to do with it. That's the end of all this for Morris. It has to be, or the only things that matter in his life—his relationship with his daughter, his career, any chance that he can go out into the world and not harm himself or someone else—will be finished.

What's admirable about Knoxville's performance here is how completely vulnerable it is. There's no artifice to the pain. Despite the actor's past hijinks and comedic roles, there's barely any attempt to inject humor, even of the defensive or self-deprecating variety, into the character. He's a man with one goal—to get sober—and plenty of fear that something will go wrong, as it has in the past when Morris thought he was at the end of his rope. It's not much of a surprise that Knoxville can play a character like this one, but it is surprising that he gives a performance as authentic as this one.

At first, the story revolves around his experiences at the group home and with the other residents. It's called Sweet Dreams, and from his familiar comfort with the man who runs the place, their paths have crossed before. A bunk has opened up in the house, since someone is leaving, standing tall and looking happy and happy. At a later point, someone in the group gets a phone call about what has happened to this man, and they're all reminded how tenuous a life outside of this place, away from a support system, and with everything life can throw at them is.

This section of the story feels right. It's thoughtful and patient, looking at how this group of men squabble, because they're struggling in a way they don't think others understand, and bond, because they know these other men actually do know. The other actors have some fun with their quirky characters, but again, Knoxville grounds the whole thing.

Eventually, there's a plot, and that's where the material stumbles. Pete (Mo Amer), the man who runs the program, is in some financial trouble, since his father has some health problems and is in the hospital. After remortgaging the property multiple times to pay those bills, it's about to be taken over by the bank and sold at auction.

Before the guys learn this, they've entered a local softball tournament with a prize of $80,000. If they win, Pete agrees to split the winning and put them in bank accounts for when they've finished with the program. As soon as they learn about likely fate of the house, the guys immediately agree to put the winnings toward paying off the loans.

It's a nice sentiment and motive, of course, that gives the new section of this story some stakes, but that also means the movie becomes divided between watching Morris' recovery and going through the motions of an underdog sports story. Initially, the team's quite bad, so we get some training montages and a lot of jokes about the players' assorted shortcomings, such as how Cruise (Bobby Lee) can't catch a ball and Diego (Erik Anthony Gonzalez) won't swing the bat.

The tournament progresses, and the guys get better enough to win. It's broadly amusing and, because of what we see back at the house and during the program, occasionally uplifting, but the other section, especially Morris learning how badly that last night went and the steps he takes for recovery, becomes hasty and shortchanged as a result.

The softball plot definitely makes the story of Sweet Dreams easier to digest, but the other, more observational side makes a good case that a story should be as tough and forthright as the source of the material is. The movie, then, isn't just narratively divided. It's also divided in its goals, its tone, and its success at telling the story it clearly wants to tell.

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