I’m not usually one for disclaimers, but the unusual brutality that serves as the backdrop for this story makes me want to begin by saying I cannot imagine how the Reiners feel in the wake of this tragedy, but to also say, from mine to yours, that we love you. Without any personal relationship or information, I am just here to provide some perspective on this film, and I’m hoping to do so in a way that helps somebody else without hurting any of you. I promise I did my best, and I hope, again, you might agree. Thank you for your courage throughout this time.—KJM

Once, my father came to my house when I was still using. We were supposed to have lunch and I never showed up and canceled without much notice. I probably went back to sleep, as I usually did on days like this, but then my phone began ringing over and over again. It was face down, but after a few times I could see the light coming up from my side table. After I looked at it, assuming he was mad, I turned it off. I’d deal with it later. I’d apologize, again, just like I always did.

Then the buzzer began to go off. And off. And off. I had a railroad apartment so I went to the kitchen and looked out the window to see my dad scrambling around my Brooklyn side street, looking desperate. We caught eyes and he knew I was there. I didn’t have time to clean so there were bottles everywhere, and it was disgusting. I was ashamed of myself but I didn’t know what to do. The jig was up, as they say. My dad would be furious, and I would deserve it. Something about that made me open the door.

When he came in and saw everything I just sat down, and expected to hear some version of what I told myself every day.

“You’re a piece of garbage.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“How could you?”

“Why?”

Instead he motioned for me to stand, gave me a hug, with tears in his eyes, and told me he loved me, and then he left.

I didn’t stop using that day—I’m not sure I even cleaned—but I’ve never forgotten it. I think that’s when I realized that it wasn’t his fault, and maybe it wasn’t anybody's. 

When The Small Bow asked me to write about Being Charlie, the subject line read “I hope you don’t think this is too ghoulish,” which I admit I appreciated. A tragedy as gruesome as any I can remember, falling upon a family as beloved as the Reiners, was something I couldn’t quite wrap my head around, and I thought it maybe most respectful that I not even try.

However, the email did stick with me, as did the subject, and truthfully I did already have some thoughts. It’s possible, as someone who comes from a famous family, and who has a history of drug abuse and being institutionalized, that I could provide a perspective wherein the goal, rather than dehumanizing sensationalism, is relatability—an attempt to identify with someone who’s done something really, really wrong, and maybe a way to see how they got there. Because compassion is what you do in recovery, and justified anger is not, even when it’s so justified that anything other than anger sort of makes you—me—sick. Even then, perhaps it’s worth trying. But I suppose we’ll see.

I read Libra when I was in grad school, about Lee Harvey Oswald’s youth riding the subway back and forth from the Bronx, and found it quite moving. Perhaps making the “bad” people different keeps us from getting better ourselves, and given that my life has become about making some sort of meaning from the bad times, viewing this film could help me look in the mirror, and perhaps even hold one up. If I do that, I tend to get better—ask my family—and if I don’t it’s not long before I’m worse. 

And so here’s the movie as I saw it. Being Kevin watching Being Charlie so that I can be better to my dad, and everyone else, because I wasn't always the kindest. And to be more understanding to those who struggle, because at one point there were people who did that for me.

The movie isn’t great, which I suppose wasn’t surprising, but in many ways it was accurate. It’s about an eighteen-year-old kid from Hollywood who’s lived much of his life in and out of treatment and whose father is a celebrity running for office. He spends most of the movie in a sober house, plotting his escape, which becomes a battle of wits, and wills, with his family. There’s smoking pits and rehab crushes. There’s bouncing knees in AA meetings and sober house rules. There’s urinalysis and overnight passes. And there’s an equating of rehab to jail, a comparison I can relate to. At my last rehab I had an oversized calendar, for all to see, upon which I marked off the days with large X’s for each one I’d passed, my then version of a nightly inventory. I couldn’t fathom how this place was helping me or anyone, and if you’ve been around long enough you begin to see, and feel, that your struggle and suffering is monetized. “Don’t you mean ‘repeat customer?’” Charlie muses when he’s referred to as a patient by one of his counselors, who for some reason in the movie, and in my life, aren’t actually sober. This sounds like something I might’ve said, or certainly thought. I’ve also been referred to as a “guest,” which was equally condescending. It becomes very clear that the treatment center’s owner is able to afford a nicer car, and watch, and home, with each and every day they hold you, especially when you have good insurance, or they can google your parents’ net worth.

So then it becomes very difficult to trust the motives of the people giving you advice. They have an enormous amount of power, as they decide when you’re allowed to leave, and they wield it. I understand, and understood, that the longer I stayed the better chance I had, but I hated it there and I didn’t want to live this way. Under those circumstances, for many, it would feel preferential to leave and die. We just don’t realize how selfish that is. Supposedly that’s symptomatic of your disease.

Bubbling through every scene in the film is a sort of disdain for a life that you feel isn’t of your choosing, and I’ve understood that throughout mine, and I can understand it still. The only difference today is I have some say in my perspective. Happiness isn’t always a choice, but isolation is. There’s a door that I go through, with people, that’s helpful, but it’s my responsibility whether or not I do. On the other side it gets better. 

My rehab experience wasn’t birthed quite as early as the characters’ was. I didn’t have to go to wilderness or treatment when I was eighteen. I made it through high school, college, and grad school still “in my disease,” although I do remember ordering painkillers from Canada to help me study when I was at Skidmore, and then having to dry out when I went home for Christmas break. Looking back at this plan it’s no surprise I was so annoyed by my family. Perhaps it wasn’t as much their fault as I’d thought.

In the film, Charlie’s father, played by Cary Elwes, is a former actor now running to be the governor of California. I’ve written thinly veiled fiction, too, because I felt I could be more honest about my experience that way. People’s feelings get very hurt when you speak in the I, although I can’t say autofiction is much better. 

It’s difficult to be anonymous as the son of someone. For many years, after college, I worked in bars and always enjoyed the first few months because nobody knew who I was. Somebody would usually figure it out—often the boss, and he’d tell—and people either liked me more or less because of my father, but it was never the same. Sports fans seemed to want to hang, but for the most part people had a number of questions.

“What are you doing here?”

“Are you working here?”

“You don’t need this, do you?”

Or, mostly, just “Why?”

I usually got through it without quitting, but it saddened me to be treated so differently. I hadn’t changed. I don’t know what your father does for a living. If I did I wouldn’t judge you. But, I don’t know, maybe I would.

The same thing happened in treatment centers, and it happened to Charlie, too. People approach with his father’s catchphrase and expect him to laugh. People always think they’re the first person to tell me I can’t be serious; I react much better now.

Back then I would’ve said it made me want to drink. Now I know that anything that made me feel bad made me drink, and I would’ve found something. It was pretty easy for me to be “vulnerable” in treatment—or to talk about how bad I was, or felt—because it made me feel better. Also, which this film pretty accurately portrays, you spend the entirety of your time in rehab doing everything you can do to get out, which is sad in retrospect. Logically, we would rather die than suffer, and for me, and for many of us, this really feels like suffering. It’s sad, because it’s probably saving your life, but I spent years—a lifetime, in fact—avoiding my feelings, and suddenly I’m meant to live in them and talk about them. Every single thing that I thought about who I was could no longer be true. And if you don’t know who you are—or worse, you thought you were wrong—then it’s hard to believe that life is worth living.

So the hope was in leaving, and it became clear to me that the more I spoke when called on, the more I curried favor with the staff. I still refused to raise my hand, but if they forced me to I did it. I’ll never forget thinking that the young guys in treatment were so naïve because they wrestled with their alcoholism and refused to say it in group. “I’m Kevin, and I’m an alcoholic and an addict,” I’d qualify, because then I was looked at like I was honest. The honest ones were the ones fighting themselves openly. I was saying what they wanted to hear and planning where and when I could finally drink again without being tested. I just wanted to live, again, without people looking through me. I just wanted to live without eyes.

But when your birth is announced on the cover of Star Magazine, or if your dad directed Stand By Me, you don’t really have that option. You’ll never really have that choice. You can either run from it or embrace it; either way you can’t care what people think.

So what I felt watching Cary Elwes play the father of Charlie as he runs for office is that the writer of this film, who had openly based it on his own experiences, had never trusted his father’s intentions as to why he was sending him away to these places in the first place. He felt that he was the black sheep, and he saw that he was damaging his father’s legacy. He thought that this is what made his father angry, not how much his son hurt. His father’s life would be easier if he didn’t exist, he thought, and I thought my parents were better off without me, too. The saddest part about that statement, in retrospect, is that it’s true. If I stayed that way they were better off if I were gone—everyone is.

I made amends to my little sister, once. I said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t around for so much of your life.”

She paused for a moment before replying, with a very clear voice, “It was hard, at first, but we got used to it.”

That hit me much harder than her being upset. I’d forced her not to care—to protect herself.

“Maybe you can get used to this now, too,” I hoped.

She nodded. I’m still trying, but it’s better. Sometimes it’s long and slow.

In recovery they sometimes say you drink at someone, and it seems to me this movie was made at his father. This is what you did to me. This is how it made me feel. If only you would’ve just trusted me, then things would be different.

Why couldn’t you have been different?

Near the end of the film the father says, “We want you to come home,” as though that’s all Charlie ever wanted or needed. Charlie denies him that, but with a hopeful disposition, as though meeting in the middle provided him the grace to finally grow up—to be himself.

I’ve wanted to meet in the middle before; it’s a frustrating way to live. And when someone like me is frustrated we don’t make it very long. I was born with an unusual need for relief, and it’ll likely kill me if untreated. It almost already has.

The most interesting part of the movie is compromised by the choice to make the father a politician, which, almost by definition, undercuts his authenticity. “I’d rather have you alive and hating me than dead on the streets,” the father says, and I think he really means it. But the writer of the film seems to want you to have questions. “Of course I love you. I’m your father,” he continues. “How could you not know that?” 

Sometimes, when we’re in it, we seem to want to be told.

That last bit, about the father loving the son, I’ve also heard and get, but that first part of the speech is rather complicated. One of the things that’s become clear to me since I got sober is that at some point you have to make a decision that you want to be sober, and the more somebody tells you that you should before you’ve made that decision yourself, the more you resent that person for doing so. However, Charlie is a heroin addict, and this is likely, seemingly, before fentanyl, and a lot of people don’t get a chance to make that decision anymore because they’ve already died. So many addicts today don’t even get a chance to feel their bottom—the desperation that’s often required for change.

So the father is trying to keep the son alive, which my father has done for me, because his son’s safety is more important than his feelings, and honestly I think that’s true. I understand the desire—the want, the need—to be heard, but my father’s responsibility was to make sure I was okay, not to make me feel okay, because nothing made me feel okay, especially not the things that I thought would. There is one very poignant moment in the movie where the girl playing Charlie’s crush shares that she thought she would “feel so much better after inpatient,” because, in her mind, inpatient was the problem. But she does not, and, as I said before, I’ve been there, too.

It wasn’t until I realized that I was the problem that anything changed, and this movie never quite gets there, and it seems likely that the writer never quite did, either. It’s pretty clear that mental health issues also plagued him, but I can speak only to what I saw here, and to the ethos of this film he made about his life and his family. He felt that his circumstances weren’t his choice, which I understand. It’s impossible for me to be my own person because everybody already thinks they know me, and what my life was like, and I haven’t even accomplished anything. With the success my parents had they’d earned respect, but for me, and likely for him, there was a disquieting mix of people knowing who I am without having accomplished anything to justify it, and that just puts a bad taste in people’s mouths. You don’t deserve what you have, they think, before I’ve even opened my mouth. You can run from it, which I have. I suppose you can take advantage of it, but no one likes the  person who asks, when cornered, “Don’t you know who my father is?” There are the proud nepo babies—any press is good press. And there are people who really let it take them down. I’ve always tended toward the latter, but there’s another choice, too. 

This is what you got, kid. Stop fighting. 

There was a guy I met once who was trying to stop drinking. I had a few years of sobriety so I thought maybe I could help him. We had coffee. He was Southern, and sweet. He asked me what I did outside of sobriety. I told him I’d written a book. He wrote, too, so he was excited. So was I. 

The next time I saw him he said he’d googled me and told me I couldn’t possibly understand him. You can’t help me. We don’t come from the same world. He seemed angry that I hadn’t told him who I was. I don’t think I’m anybody, so I don’t tend to do that.

We never spoke again. 

It can be, and has been, embittering to encounter people who think this way—people who presuppose—and it helped foster a feeling of terminal uniqueness that took me some time to overcome. In many ways, I suppose, my family situation is objectively unique—not a lot of people’s parents are actors and tennis players—but the longer I’ve been around the more I have come to think that everybody’s family’s crazy, and also how dangerous fitting out can be. Many of us feel alone—a self-nurtured sense of standing apart—but I always thought my feeling was worse, and impossible. I thought my problems were in my genes—my mom is a drug addict, and her mom before her, and they never stopped, and so we’re stuck. We’re defined by who we’re from, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And then the only thing left is escape. 

But I don’t think like that anymore. I don’t think I’m worse or better or more troubled than anybody—I’m not really even different. Unfortunately I just had to figure that out for myself, and that process hurts because change hurts. I’m not sure Being Charlie was willing to feel that.

I was arrested when I was twenty-five and spent the night in the tombs under City Hall. Somehow when I was in there, the press found out, and I was on the cover of the New York Post. There was a picture of me, in high school, and of my mother and father, with a headline that read “FAMILY CURSE" and a subheadline that read “McEnroe & Tatum kid in drug bust.” 

My name didn’t even make it on there—just somebody’s kid. I understand feeling like that’s a box that you didn’t ask for, and it can sometimes make you wish things were different and can make you envious, too. I’ve heard for much of my life how privileged I was, and in just about every way that’s true, but I was always so jealous of how Allen Iverson’s mother seemed to be his biggest fan. They came from nothing and she was so proud of him—once, on a live broadcast, she was caught on the bench braiding his hair.

My mom was a heroin addict, and I always worried about her, and still do. I became one, too, and much of my family struggles, and have struggled publicly—and, thus, family curse.

But even though this wasn’t my choice I still get to choose it, if I want to. That part is up to me. I get to accept my family for who they are, and in doing so recognize that I’m lucky to still be here. It’s obvious to me how fortunate I am now, but that’s only because I pushed everyone away and almost killed myself drinking and using. It’s not in spite of my issues but because of them that I’m happy today, in a way that I wasn’t when I was younger, and so a grateful alcoholic I suppose I am, even though my God that line used to make me crazy.

And so, with that, I love my dad, and get him and realize how alike we are, even though, in this one way, we’re different. He has a beer a night—sometimes just a half, which I can’t comprehend—and as much as I liked our Budweisers at the Knicks game I always kept going, and he did not. I’ve joked before that my father respecting my alcoholism is him enjoying a margarita in the other room rather than right in front of me, but I don’t need understanding the same way I used to. Meeting in the middle has always been the problem. Today I enjoy the responsibility of trying to understand him. It feels very freeing that it’s my job.

The saddest part of Being Charlie, for me, is the idea of Rob Reiner directing it. They did press together, when it came out, wherein Rob sat next to his son, proud of him, and spoke lovingly of the movie, and of him. The son had written a movie wherein the father is clearly positioned as the villain, and Rob produced and directed this film for him in what feels like an attempt to say I’m sorry.

I’m sorry I put you in all these places. I wish we could’ve just talked. I’m sorry you have this disease, and I’m sorry I was mad at you for it. I’m sorry I didn’t trust you, and I wish things could’ve been different. I encourage you to write, and I’ll help you tell your story, because that’s our family’s language. I love you for exactly who you are, and want to help you. I love you no matter what.

It’s a beautiful thing to do—it makes me feel sad writing it—and it makes it clear that he would’ve done just about anything—ANYTHING—for his boy to get better, and to feel better, but it just seems to prove that you can’t do it for somebody else. Much like with Ann Iverson, you can feel relentless love, care, and support radiating off Rob Reiner, in interviews talking about this movie and his son. I think about my own dad, standing outside my apartment, worried. In choosing to make this for him he is buzzing his son’s door, begging to get in, and he is able to hug him, and hopefully, be the one who finds the middle ground. 

For whatever reason, and just based on what he was trying to say in Being Charlie, Nick Reiner was incapable of choosing to be Rob Reiner’s son, and unconditional love, for us, is not enough of an answer. We’ll just keep taking and taking and choose, instead, to be the funniest guy in rehab, who’s always the funniest guy in the next rehab. He wasn’t able to choose to do it for himself, and instead, it seems, resented the person for loving him. It’s sometimes impossible for us to see or know any better. He just couldn’t choose life, for himself or others.

Being Kevin watching Being Charlie makes me feel sad about this disease and for the family desperate to love someone they can’t save. My own family was once riddled with addiction, and its wake is devastating. But sobriety can bring calmer waters, clearer even than they were before. And, in that way, this film makes me love my dad, and maybe that’ll make me a good one, some day, too, so for that it was all worth it. All of it—from a lineage of drugs and blame to using to touching the bottom. To forgiveness, to hope. Maybe I’ll call them, whether I feel like it or not, and love them, and be a part of things getting better. Maybe I’ll get to live another day as me. For that it’s worth it, to change. For that it’s always worth it.