It's Kind of a Funny Story

It's Kind of a Funny Story (2010) begins with Craig, sixteen, checking himself into a psychiatric ward. He arrives with school pressure and suicidal thoughts. The rule is that anyone admitted stays at least five days. The adolescent wing is being renovated, so he is placed with the adults. The source is Ned Vizzini's 2006 novel. He wrote it out of his own experience as an inpatient; he had spent five days on a psychiatric ward and wrote the book afterwards. Vizzini died by suicide in 2013 at thirty two, and that changes how both the book and the film are read now. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck directed; they would later make Captain Marvel. Keir Gilchrist plays Craig, Zach Galifianakis a patient on the ward and Emma Roberts another young patient. Galifianakis is the best thing in it, and the moments where a comic actor goes somewhere entirely unfunny are where the film works. It runs 102 minutes. Good for: films about adolescence and mental health, gently pitched drama, and the dramatic side of Galifianakis. Less good for: it offers a recovery that resolves in five days, which is not realistic, and its portrayal of serious mental illness is superficial. The musical fantasy sequence breaks the tone. Most of the novel's darkness has been softened away.