The Sundance Film Festival website has just unveiled a ‘Meet The Artist’ video of Christopher Thornton and Mark Ruffalo profiling their upcoming film “Sympathy For Delicious” and also features two clips from the film.
Written by and starring real-life paraplegic Thornton, first-time director Ruffalo reveals that the film is “very personal” in that he took inspiration from “watching his friend Thornton struggle with becoming paralyzed, a lot of that struggle had to do with “why?, ‘where does this come from?’ and ‘how do I place this in the mythology of my life?,’ ‘how do I make sense of this?”
Sounds like the film will have a deep emotional core at the heart of its supernatural, rock n’ roll exterior. There’s a clip in the video that features Juliette Lewis and Thornton and, while it’s probably out of context, it seems like an early barometer for what we can look forward to. The Sundance page’s synopsis describes ‘Delicious’ as a “gritty, yet fervent, take on the search for meaning amidst tragedy and the redemptive power that is compassion.” We’re sold. It’ll be fascinating alone to see what Thornton brings to what we assume will be a no-holds-barred story in both his writing and acting, which hopefully he can deliver on.
“Dean O’Dwyer is a D.J. named Delicious D,” explains Thornton of the plot. “He’s had an accident and he’s down and out, he’s living in his car. He parks near Skid Road to get a free meal off a soup line by a very kind young priest named Father Joe (Ruffalo). And he’s been going to healing services or at least one that we know of. And he, in a very bizarre twist of fate, wakes up one day and his hands are hurting and he’s able to lay hands and heal people.”
“And he basically takes his gift, his god-given gift, and prostitutes it for sex, drugs, rock and roll and fame,” adds Ruffalo. The film co-stars the likes of Orlando Bloom, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich and John Carroll Lynch, who also features in the video, and will feature a score by Canadian orchestral indie rockers, The Besnard Lakes, and music written by Shiny Toy Guns performed by The Mars Volta’s Cedric Bixler-Zavala — who will also act as a vocal stand-in for Bloom’s musician character on at least one song.
“Sympathy For Delicious” premieres at Sundance on the 23rd of January.