WHAT YOU COULD HAVE WON

The relationship between a divergently motivated man and woman flares and fades—but these aren’t average people.

Astrid is a meteor of musical talent, reminiscent of Janis Joplin or Amy Winehouse. Famous on MTV and recognized internationally, she’s also drug-dependent, and in Henry Sinclair, she has found the perfect package: a drug-supplying boyfriend. But Henry has his own agenda. An ambitious British psychiatrist, he’s hoping, despite conflicts with his boss, to make his reputation with a book and also with a patient he calls BirdBoy. Henry’s self-motivated involvement with bright-burning Astrid drives this fractured contemporary tale that switches between the second person for Astrid—“You have waited and Henry has not come”—and Henry’s first-person point of view. Scenes cut, cross, and interconnect to compose a cubist portrait of the relationship: the couple’s meet-cute at the Eliot Perlman Wellness Center in Manhattan, Astrid’s first paid gig; their prickly camping holiday on a Greek island; her road trip; his laboratory; her visit to a bizarre rehab clinic in Paris. Glimpses of satisfying early moments contrast with Astrid’s neediness and Henry’s chilly limitations: “I am not the kind of man who gets in deep.” This caustic tale of toxic co-dependency comes with copious drug-taking, psychological theorizing, and oblique self-scrutiny: “Soon enough there will be no more easy choices at all and that is a phantom tragedy that escapes these two eyes and breathes only into the future.” Genn, a neuroscientist and artist, displays strength in her intensity and scene painting, like Astrid’s performance at a substance-fueled gig or the blackly comic description of three naked men attempting to revive her after she chokes on a doughnut. But the stylistic density swaddles the relationship in cerebral layers.

A playful but challenging cautionary tale.