The End of the Tour

A film made out of an interview conducted in 1996. David Lipsky spends five days with the writer David Foster Wallace for Rolling Stone. Wallace has just published Infinite Jest and is on the last leg of the book tour. The two drive, wait for planes, talk at petrol stations, and the tape is always running. The whole substance of the film is those conversations. The subjects drift: what fame is for, television addiction, loneliness, and whether a writer's effort to seem sincere is itself a pose. Lipsky is both admiring and envious, and the film does not hide it. The source is the text Lipsky made from his interview tapes years later. Wallace died in 2008 and the book was published after his death. The trust that manages Wallace's literary estate objected to the film openly, stating that the writer would not have wanted such a production. Jason Segel plays Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg plays Lipsky. An important work for anyone who likes films built on dialogue and portraits of writers. For a viewer wanting incident, it is almost entirely two men talking and sets up no dramatic turning point.