On the most superficial level, “The End of the Tour” is about David Foster Wallace, who electrified the literary world in 1996 with the publication of his epic breakout novel “Infinite Jest,” and who took his own life in 2008.
As Wallace, Jason Segel delivers a sweet, shambolic performance, affecting a doughy softness and the author’s signature wire-rim glasses and bandanna. But to appraise “The End of the Tour” as a portrait of a tortured genius too fine for this world is to risk missing the point of the film. In the hands of screenwriter Donald Margulies and director James Ponsoldt, Wallace becomes a character in his own right: a brilliant, compulsively engaging player in a pas de deux that touches on everything from creativity, ambivalence and competition to the unspoken rules that govern celebrity reporting at its most transactional.
“The End of the Tour” is an adaptation of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” the 2010 book written by journalist David Lipsky. As Wallace was finishing his 1996 book tour for “Infinite Jest,” Lipsky was assigned to write a profile of him for Rolling Stone. Although his piece was never published in the magazine, Lipsky decided after Wallace died to transcribe their five-day encounter.
It bears noting that Wallace’s family and estate have strongly objected to the movie version, insisting that Wallace would have been mortified to be reduced — and inevitably distorted — to a cinematic construction. It also bears noting that “The End of the Tour” accomplishes what the best fact-based dramas aspire to, occupying a space between truth and fiction that illuminates otherwise obscure corners of what it means to be human. Part love story, part road trip, part elegy to a bygone, pre-9/11 age, “The End of the Tour” brims with compassion and sharply honed insight. Even at its funniest and most testy, this brief bromance aches with tenderness and a wistful sense of loss.
Segel’s opposite number is Jesse Eisenberg, who brings his usual rabbity recessiveness to the character of Lipsky, who when he trudges out to Bloomington, Ill. — where Wallace is teaching — has just published his own novel. Arriving at Wallace’s unprepossessing ranch home, he’s prepared to meet the heroic author and burgeoning literary rock star that he has conjured in his most resentful speculations. Instead, Wallace turns out to be as ungainly and endearing as his two sloppily affectionate black Labs.
He’s also a tongue-tied, reluctant subject. But once Lipsky turns on his tape recorder, and conversation begins, it doesn’t end for nearly a week: Bonding over candy and junk food in the bleak snowscape; flying to Minneapolis for a reading and a reunion with two pretty acquaintances of Wallace’s; smoking cigarettes late into the night; listening to R.E.M. — the two Davids often resemble doppelgangers, one coming to terms with being on the verge of greatness, the other simultaneously mesmerized and threatened by the fact that it’s someone else and not him.
Margulies, a playwright, was just the right choice to write the script. Filmed like a chamber piece, “The End of the Tour” begins with Wallace dazzling Lipsky with his off-handed exegeses of pop culture, his command of moral subtleties and his surpassing humility. Eventually — inevitably — it curdles into a coded, passive-aggressive fight for control. In a telling gesture, Lipsky brings along a copy of his book when he embarks on his journey to meet Wallace. Just as pointedly, Wallace never asks to see it.
All of this sounds talky. (It is about a couple of guys sitting around talking, after all.) But Ponsoldt, who directed “The Spectacular Now” and “Smashed,” creates a wonderfully dynamic space for the words to flow, packing in an enormous amount of visual information.
