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The End of the Tour

The story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace, which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace's gr... Read all The story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace, which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace's groundbreaking epic novel, 'Infinite Jest.' The story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace, which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace's groundbreaking epic novel, 'Infinite Jest.'

James Ponsoldt
Donald Margulies
David Lipsky
Jason Segel
Jesse Eisenberg
Anna Chlumsky
108 User reviews
192 Critic reviews
82 Metascore
4 wins & 18 nominations

David Foster Wallace

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Trivia The song heard on the soundtrack when the film ends is "The Big Ship" by Brian Eno , one of David Foster Wallace 's favorite songs. It was also used for the climax of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015) , another film that premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
Goofs In regards to the scene where Mrs. Gunderson gives Mr. Wallace and Mr. Lipsky a car tour of Minneapolis sites: The Mary Tyler Moore statue on Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis, was not given to the City by TV Land until 2002. Also, it is not legal for cars to drive down Nicollet Mall.

David Foster Wallace : It may be in the old days what was known as a spiritual crisis: feeling as though every axiom in your life turned out to be false... and there was actually nothing. And that you were nothing. And that it's all a delusion and you're so much better than everybody 'cause you can see how this is just a delusion, and you're so much worse because you can't fucking function.

Crazy credits Halfway through the closing credits, there is an extra scene told from the perspective of David Foster Wallace as Lipsky goes to the bathroom to wash out the chewing tobacco. It shows what Wallace did while he was in the bathroom: he speaks privately into the tape recorder.
Connections Featured in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: Jason Segel/Amy Sedaris/Alessia Cara (2015)
Soundtracks Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow Written by Lawrence and Maurice Deebank Performed by Felt Courtesy of Cherry Red Records

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Runtime 1 hour 46 minutes
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The End of the Tour

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Brilliantly performed and smartly unconventional, The End of the Tour pays fitting tribute to a singular talent while offering profoundly poignant observations on the human condition.

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Review: ‘The End of the Tour’ Offers a Tale of Two Davids

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By A.O. Scott

July 30, 2015

“There’s an unhappy paradox about literary biographies,” David Foster Wallace observed in The New York Times Book Review in 2004, in reference to “Borges: A Life.” Readers who pick up such books, drawn by their admiration for a writer’s work, are likely to find themselves distracted and disappointed by a welter of iffy theories and picayune data. In the case of Borges, Wallace argued, “the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant.”

The same can be said of Wallace himself, and, for that matter, of just about any author worth reading. The work is everything; the life is trivia. And since I’m about to praise a movie about David Foster Wallace that claims fidelity to at least some of the facts of his life, I should perhaps identify myself as a devoted nonconsumer of literary biographies, an avowed biopic skeptic and, unless someone offers me a lot of money to write one, a habitual avoider of celebrity profiles. So by all rights I should hate “ The End of the Tour ,” James Ponsoldt’s new film, a portrait of the writer that has its origins in a (never-published) magazine profile. In fact, I love it.

Some of the people closest to Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, have condemned the movie sight unseen, and friends of his who did see it ( one of them also a friend of mine) have found fault with both its details and its overall design. As an ardent , ambivalent reader of Wallace’s prose and a complete stranger to him personally, I can only respect such objections. But the movie, in my view, disarms them — not because it offers an especially loving or lifelike picture of its subject but rather because David Foster Wallace is not really its subject at all. “The End of the Tour” is at once an exercise in post-postmodern literary mythmaking and an unsparing demolition of the contemporary mythology of the writer. It’s ultimately a movie — one of the most rigorous and thoughtful I’ve seen — about the ethical and existential traps our fame-crazed culture sets for the talented and the mediocre alike.

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘End of the Tour’

The director james ponsoldt discusses a sequence from his film “the end of the tour,” featuring jesse eisenberg and jason segel and opening july 31..

There are two Davids in the movie, which takes place in 1996. Both of them are writers. One is Wallace (Jason Segel), whose third book of fiction, the 1,079-page dystopian tennis-rehab epic “Infinite Jest,” has just been published to hyperbolic acclaim . The other is David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), whose own recently released novel, “The Art Fair,” has met with polite indifference. An early scene finds him on his couch reading “Infinite Jest” while his girlfriend, Sarah (Anna Chlumsky), is curled up with the season’s other fictional blockbuster, the anonymously published political roman à clef “Primary Colors.” (Oh, the ’90s. Sorry you missed all the fun, kids. Kind of sorry I didn’t.)

David L., a new, probationary hire at Rolling Stone magazine, convinces his skeptical editor (Ron Livingston) that David F.W. is worthy of a feature article, and so finds himself in Bloomington, Ill., in the middle of winter. (Wallace taught for many years at Illinois State University.) The plan is that the reporter will accompany the novelist to Minneapolis, the last stop on his book tour. He does, and that’s pretty much the plot of the movie.

Mr. Ponsoldt, whose earlier features include “The Spectacular Now” and “Smashed,” would much rather observe two people in aimless conversation than usher them through the tollbooths of narrative convention. And conversation, including the uncomfortable silences that punctuate it, is pretty much the entire substance of “The End of the Tour.” Yes, there’s a fair amount of smoking and junk-food eating, an excursion to the Mall of America and a multiplex showing of “ Broken Arrow ” (with John Travolta taking a missile to the gut), but Mr. Ponsoldt and the screenwriter, the playwright Donald Margulies, allow words to speak louder than actions.

Many of the words are Wallace’s own, uttered into Mr. Lipsky’s tape recorder in 1996 and transcribed, 14 years later, for publication in a book called “ Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself .” Funny, intriguing and revealing as this talk may be, it does not have anything like the status of Wallace’s writing. The film not only acknowledges this distinction, but it also insists on it. In his would-be profiler’s company, occasionally glancing at the menacing red light of the predigital tape recorder, Wallace is by turns cagey and candid, witty and earnest, but he is always aware, at times painfully, that he is playing the role of a writer in someone else’s fantasy. Actually writing is something he does when no one else is around.

Mr. Segel’s performance, whether it captures the true Wallace or not, is sharp and sensitive, in no small part because it’s modest and appropriately evasive. The essential David Wallace is precisely what the film reminds us we can’t see, even as David Lipsky wants desperately to track him down and display him to the readers of Rolling Stone. Wallace is caught in a familiar set of contradictions. He wants attention but craves solitude. He’s willing to collaborate with the machinery of publicity even as he worries about the phoniness of it all. He’s ambitious and eager to protect himself from the consequences of his ambition. In short, he’s a famous writer.

Movie Review: ‘The End of the Tour’

The times critic a.o. scott reviews “the end of tour.”.

As such he is, for his short-term companion, both alpha dog and prey, an object of envy as well as admiration, a meal ticket and an imaginary friend. The film poses the question “Who is the real David Foster Wallace?” as a feint. He is its premise, its axiom, its great white whale. The more relevant question, the moral problem on which the movie turns, is “who is David Lipsky?”

In real life, David Lipsky might be a great guy, but on screen he is played by Mr. Eisenberg, which means that his genetic material is at least 25 percent weasel. Wallace at one point playfully describes himself as “pleasantly unpleasant.” Lipsky is unpleasantly pleasant, which is much worse. Twitchy and ingratiating, he wants to be a tough journalist and a pal. He desperately wants Wallace to regard him as a peer and can hardly contain his jealousy. He berates Sarah after she chats with Wallace on the phone and falls into a defensive snit after Wallace accuses him of flirting with Betsy (Mickey Sumner), a poet who had known Wallace in graduate school.

His awfulness is, to some degree, structural. A profile writer, especially in the company of another writer, is a false friend who dreams of being a secret sharer. Lipsky’s assignment is to pry, distort and betray, to use Wallace’s words and the details of his existence as material for his own dubious project. Wallace knows this and acquiesces to it — “you agreed to the interview” is Lipsky’s fallback when his subject gets prickly — and generally handles himself with grace and forbearance.

You may find yourself wishing that he didn’t have to, which is to say wishing that “The End of the Tour” didn’t exist even as you hang on its every word and revel in its rough, vernacular beauty. In an ideal world, we would all sit at home reading “Infinite Jest” and then go out to eat hamburgers, argue about philosophy and watch cheesy action blockbusters. There would be no pseudo-authoritative biographies or prying, preening magazine profiles to complicate our pleasures, and ambitious actors would not dare to impersonate beloved novelists. But the world we live in is plagued by all of those things. There will always be films about writers and writing, and this one is just about as good as it gets.

“The End of the Tour” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Language. So much language.

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Directed by James Ponsoldt (" The Spectacular Now "), "The End of the Tour" might fit well on a double bill with " Amadeus ," another film about a genius and a lesser artist who basks in his aura. Of course, the setting is very different, and the stakes are much lower—"Tour" is a fictionalized account of the week-and-a-half that Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky spent following the late David Foster Wallace as he toured to promote his doorstop-sized masterpiece "Infinite Jest"—but it's still the story of a competent but unremarkable creative person observing brilliance up close, feeding on it, reveling in it and resenting it.

It is also certainly one of cinema's finest explorations of an incredibly specific dynamic—that of the cultural giant and the reporter who fantasizes about one day being as great as his subject, and in the same field. What it definitely isn't is a biography of David Foster Wallace, much less a celebration of his work and worldview. Whether that proves a deal breaker, a bonus, or a non-factor for viewers will depend on what they want out of this movie.

"The End of the Tour" is not really about Wallace ( Jason Segel ), although he's the other major character. It starts with Lipsky ( Jesse Eisenberg ) expressing amazement (but really jealousy) over a rave review of "Infinite Jest" in New York magazine, a moment that sparks his obsession with Wallace. It ultimately leaves us thinking about Lipsky's feelings and career trajectory, and whether he feels any guilt about using his brief association with Wallace to further his own career as a writer of books. At this point in his life, Lipsky has had just one volume published, a novel that few people bought and fewer read; after some hesitation, he foists it on Wallace while visiting him at the University of Illinois during a punishingly icy winter.

The screenplay by Donald Margulies spends most of its time and energy observing a dance. One dancer is Lipsky. He only got Rolling Stone to pay for his rock-star style profile of a novelist by agreeing to ask Wallace about the rumors that he uses heroin, and his motivations for doing the story are, to put it mildly, less than noble. The other dancer is Wallace. His fiction and nonfiction were partly concerned with the meaning of the word "authenticity," and how the social rituals and technology and economic structure of modern life created false intimacies that Wallace was determined to reject.

Theirs is a complex relationship, brief as it is. The most fascinating thing about it is how each side of it seems to be happening in a different storytelling genre.

Wallace's side of the story is something along the lines of a light drama, perhaps even a romance, about somebody who's been burned over and over and has withdrawn from nearly all relationships save for a handful that he feels he can trust and believe in. Although the small part of the world that cares about writers' private lives thinks of Wallace as a bit of a recluse and perhaps a bit mysterious, it's immediately clear that he's just selective and self-protecting. It's the story of a man learning to trust again (in a love story, it would be "to love again") while worrying that he's going to get burned one more time. Lipsky isn't a Wallace-level intellect, he is very smart, and a good listener, and excellent at getting subjects to open up, even though his demeanor is presumptuous. He doesn't approach Wallace with the appropriate humility. He instead comes at him from the point-of-view of a writer who believes that he is Wallace's potential equal—somebody as profound as Wallace but not as accomplished or famous, for now. Wallace seems to buy this. Why? Maybe because he's a teacher, and at least a few of his students have real talent, and he doesn't want his ego or insecurity to rule out the possibility that he might cross paths with an artist. Or maybe he's just a decent, optimistic guy.

Lipsky's side of the story often feels like the story of of a con man, or a regular person who uses other people without realizing that's what he's doing. If this were a romantic drama, Lipsky might be a drug user who swears he's gotten clean, or a recovering alcoholic who's not as far along in the process as he claims to be, or a serial cheater who wants everyone to think he's reformed and can be monogamous even though he's constitutionally incapable of that. We keep waiting for the other shoe to drop—for Wallace, who genuinely likes Lipsky even though he's observant enough to spot all the warning signs immediately, to realize that Lipsky cannot have a real friendship with him, and that in general it is a bad idea for a subject to think that he can have that kind of relationship with a reporter.

Any journalist who's been profiling famous people for any length of time will recognize the dynamic depicted here by Ponsoldt, Eisenberg and Jason Segel, and the honest ones will be made uncomfortable by it. There is something vampiric about features like the one that Lipsky has been assigned to write. There are also elements of theatricality. As Wallace observes early on, the subject is expected to give a performance of sorts, imitating the person he'd like to be perceived as being. The reporter in turn playacts casual curiosity, and tries to push past the facade and find something real, maybe uncomfortable, best of all revelatory.

Segel and Eisenberg, who as movie stars have been in Wallace's position many times, have an intuitive understanding of how this relationship works, and they illuminate it in the moment, with specificity and clarity. Segel doesn't really look or sound like Wallace (not that that matters; Anthony Hopkins didn't look or sound like Nixon in " Nixon " but was extraordinary) and I didn't necessarily buy him as somebody who could write like Wallace, but he's so smart and genuine and peculiar that we believe he is capable of Wallace's extreme sensitivity and delicate observations—a major accomplishment. Eisenberg is the true star of the movie—an actor of extraordinary originality and also bravery, insofar as he never seems to trouble himself with whether people will hate his characters. He's a great listener but also a rather scary one. His characters often seem to be scrutinizing other characters the way a snake might scrutinize a field mouse. There are many moments in "The End of the Tour" when we dislike Lipsky. There are a few moments where we might find him sickening.

Is this a story that will fascinate an audience beyond editors, critics, reporters, novelists, and people who care about the problems of such people? I have no idea, though it seems unlikely; the film's incredible specificity would seem to mitigate against being discovered and championed by a wide audience, despite Segel and Eisenberg's presence in the cast. Did the film necessarily need to have David Foster Wallace as one of its two main characters? That's a thornier question. We rarely hear any of his prose read aloud (Lipsky reads a passage of "Jest" to his girlfriend, but that's about it) and there is nothing in the film besides some of Wallace's dialogue to indicate that the movie has any interest in illuminating Wallace's fiction, or the obsessions that he worked into them.

It is very much an Amadeus and Salieri story, and if you are familiar with Amadeus, and the barest outlines of Wallace's life, and the fact that this is based on a nonfiction book by the writer David Lipsky, you know how the story must end: with Lipsky gaining a greater measure of fame via his brief association with Wallace and not being quite sure how to feel about it. The best thing you could say about "The End of the Tour" is that it could've been about any two creative people. That's also the worst thing you could say about it.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

The End of the Tour (2015)

Rated R for language including some sexual references

106 minutes

Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace

Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipsky

Anna Chlumsky as Sarah

Mamie Gummer

Joan Cusack as Patty

Ron Livingston as David Lipsky's Editor

Mickey Sumner as Betsy

James Ponsoldt
Donald Margulies

Director of Photography

Original music composer.

Danny Elfman

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How ‘End of the Tour’ became a very David Foster Wallace kind of film

Author David Foster Wallace on March 18, 1996.

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Right after the new road movie “The End of the Tour” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, a movie-industry friend texted me her thoughts. Starring Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg, “End of the Tour” chronicles a real-life journey taken by then-Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky (Eisenberg) and the late postmodern novelist David Foster Wallace (Segel) just before Wallace’s career blew up in 1996, and the movie electrified with its ability to tuck meaningful truths into banal Middle American settings.

My friend, however, was not feeling the charge. “Journalist film,” she said tersely, and while I wished she was just paying a compliment to Walter Cronkite, I knew better.

On one hand, I could see her point. “End of the Tour” is a seemingly insular exercise — a film concerned with words and the words of the people who like words.

Yet the essence of her critique — that, as the armchair critic might say, “not much happens” — is also what made the movie special and of interest (I hoped) to more than a coterie of early-adopter writers.

Arriving in theaters July 31, “End of the Tour” tackles heady subjects like the American penchant for self-distraction, the tango between genius and depression, the role of groupthink in value systems and the powder keg that is the mentor-protege relationship. All of these topics come with insight to burn, making the 106-minute movie as packed with ideas as “Jurassic World” is with velociraptor attacks. (It also hasn’t made everyone who knew Wallace happy, but more on that shortly.)

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Equally important as what the film talks about, though, is how it frames that discussion. Under director James Ponsoldt and screenwriter Donald Margulies (the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, basing his screenplay on Lipsky’s book and the Wallace-Lipsky conversations in it), “End of the Tour” broaches its subjects with a minimum of biographical niceties or melodrama. Instead, it relies on ideas, character shadings and charm — the verve of a road-trip movie with the depth of a college seminar.

“One of the pitfalls with a film like this is that you can just end up with two people saying smart things in turn,” Segel said. “Instead, it’s a conversation. And the best conversation I ever heard. Two guys are talking in a car, and it’s weighty and intense, but it’s also fun.”

The idea of unleashing a wild energy on sublime topics isn’t a new trick, of course. It’s one practiced — some would say perfected — by Wallace himself. In works like the essay collection “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” the Kenyon graduation speech “This Is Water” and of course the mega-novel “Infinite Jest,” he scalpeled into our cultural pathologies with keen observation and foot-noted glee.

In a neat formal achievement, then, the movie has managed to take the same sophisticated approach Wallace took in his writing and applied it to a movie about David Foster Wallace.

Which, it must be said, is very David Foster Wallace.

Complicated figure

On a sweltering day near the Yale University campus, Donald Margulies sat in a bookstore contemplating one of modern literature’s most complicated figures. Behind him were copies of Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” and the posthumously published award winner “The Pale King” — suggesting to what degree the author, who in 2008 committed suicide at age 46 in his home in Claremont after a long battle with depression, still loomed over contemporary intellectual life, if not the bestseller list.

Margulies is an unlikely person to bring Wallace to the movie masses. Though much of his work (“Time Stands Still,” “Collected Stories”) centers on artists, the playwright, now 60, was somewhat beyond Wallace’s target audience when the author’s sharp cultural critiques hit the Gen-X solar plexus in the 1990s.

Yet when Margulies’ manager sent him Lipsky’s memoir, “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself” — about Lipsky’s reportorial travels with Wallace in Illinois and Minnesota during the “Infinite Jest” press circuit — Margulies was piqued. Here was a story of two men circling each other in a literary sumo match: Lipsky, a novelist in his own right, envious of his subject’s emerging success; Wallace, already bronzing under the glare of expectation, suspicious of his interrogator.

If the book was just about two writers contemplating their lives, Margulies might had little interest in adapting it. But the story throbbed with psychological vigor.

“It’s all in the subtext,” Margulies said. “Lipsky’s agenda, the competitiveness, Wallace about to hit the stratosphere, the ticking clock of a young reporter going back to New York — it was all there.”

A play might have seemed to make more sense. The book was dialogue-heavy and action-lite, filled with Lipsky’s solicitous questions and Wallace’s self-aware answers. And Margulies had never had a feature screenplay produced before. But he saw in the Lipsky book a classic road movie: two headstrong personalities locked in tight spaces, hashing out the American condition as manifestations of it rolled by the car window.

Margulies, who teaches English and theater studies at Yale, called Ponsoldt, a former student, and asked if he might want to direct his script. With earlier films “Smashed” and “The Spectacular Now,” Ponsoldt, 37, had taken heightened genres — the addiction drama, the teen love story — and filmed them with an unadorned realism. His seemed like the right cool hands.

“We were acutely aware of the genre conceits of the tortured-artist movie,” Ponsoldt said by phone of his overall approach. “You know, where the addiction or disease is reduced to a series of tics and mania, with pages flying off the typewriter or paint off the canvas. I wanted to show a guy who didn’t seem quote-unquote sad, who had a lot of charm, who was very human.”

Lipsky is portrayed with his own complexity; he is interviewing Wallace even as he clearly wants to be Wallace. (Since the trip, Lipsky has concentrated mostly on nonfiction, such as with the well-regarded “Absolutely American,” about life at West Point.)

Ponsoldt said he wanted to eschew the sweep of many famous-artist films, which devolve into biopic cliche. “There’s no God’s-eye point-of-view, nothing omniscient — just a subjective look at a brief window of time,” he said of the movie, which is seen through Lipsky’s eyes and set mainly over just five days.

That favoring of depth over breadth — and certainly this particular moment of depth — may be part of the reason the movie has stirred upset among a few keepers of the Wallace flame. The author’s literary trust — composed primarily of widow Karen Green — and publisher Little, Brown, led by longtime editor Michael Pietsch, disavowed the movie in a statement while it was in production.

In an email this week, Pietsch said he wouldn’t see the film and explained his objections.

“David would have howled the idea for it out of the room had it been suggested while he was living, and the fact that it can go ahead because he’s dead makes me very, very sad,” he wrote. “Anyone who has read David’s writing knows how tormented he felt about being a public figure and his overwhelming anxiety about being on the wrong side of the screen. The existence of a mythification of this brief passage of his life strikes me as an affront to him and to people who love his writing.”

Alex Kohner, the lawyer and co-trustee of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust, said that filmmakers were dining out on a reputation that wasn’t theirs to use. “People wouldn’t see this movie if it was just two guys driving around. They’re selling David’s good name. They’ve got Jason Segel putting a bandanna on.

“We don’t care if the movie’s good or not good. Under no circumstances would we or David have agreed to this,” he added. It’s not yet clear if there will be any legal action, though; recourse on these grounds is far more limited after a person has died.

Kohner said that he and his law partner had numerous correspondences with representatives for Segel and Ponsoldt urging them not to make this movie before it went into production. Ponsoldt would later call Green, who offered him the rights to a Wallace book in the hope that it would be the author’s work, and not his persona, that would be memorialized on screen. When the movie forged ahead, Kohner, Green and Pietsch decided to go pbulic and issued the statement during production. (Green, incidentally, is not portrayed in the movie; she would not meet Wallace until years after the 1996 trip.)

Ponsoldt said that he understood the group’s position but thought Green and Pietsch misread his intentions.

“I haven’t personally experienced it to know what happens when someone you love is being played by an actor,” he said. “But we were telling David Lipsky’s story ... which came out years before.” He added, “We made this movie because we love and revere [Wallace’s] writing, and we want to depict him with empathy and humanity. I hope anyone who sees the film understands that.”

Segel said he had similarly pure motives.

“I didn’t hear about the issue until we’re almost done shooting,” he said. “I really do understand it’s a very complicated, emotional and uncomfortable situation. My personal feeling in taking on the movie and especially in seeing it is that it’s a real extension of David Foster Wallace’s themes and writing.”

Viewers will make up their own minds on the specifics of the portrayal. While the film certainly stays far away from the idea of “St. Dave” — the ironic nickname some friends have used to describe what they see as an unhealthy deification of the author — and does offer moments of prickliness, Segel’s nuanced performance leaves an impression of sympathy and vulnerability. Wallace on the cusp of stardom is worried about his privacy, which is shrinking, as well as the pressure, which is building.

“There are struggles in a situation like this that are very real,” Margulies said. “How do you move on when there are now expectations in a place where formerly there were none? How do you move on when peers are rating your work and comparing it to what you’ve done in the past?”

Literary greats

Movies with literary greats at their center — C.S. Lewis in “Shadowlands,” Dickens in “The Invisible Woman”— tend to be largely about the writer’s difficult life, less so about the ideas that made those difficulties worthwhile.

“Tour,” on the other hand, teems with ideas--not least of which is the author’s much-mined concern with entertainment’s deleterious effects and the power of technology to lubricate them.

“Wallace was anticipating things that are banal to us — that famous Facetime technology in ‘Infinite Jest’ for instance, which we now live with in an unquestioning way,” said Chritophers Schaberg, a professor at Loyola University New Orleans who teaches a class on the author. “Everything we’re seeing now with distraction and constant connectivity were matters Wallace was very aware of 20 years ago.”

But far from a jeremiad, Wallace offered these cautions in a spirit of solidarity. It’s a feeling that’s captured subtly in the film, as Wallace is seen indulging in trash TV and junk food while on tour for the very book diagnosing those symptoms.

“I feel like Wallace wasn’t as much a preacher as he was somebody sending out a distress signal,” Segel said. “It’s someone right in the middle of the pack, saying, ‘Does anyone else feel this way?’ He’s just saying it more eloquently than any of us could say it.”

Or as Wallace offers in the movie: “Writers aren’t smarter than anyone else. They’re just more compelling in their stupidity, or their confusion.”

There is something paradoxical about Wallace as a public figure. He is both of the moment and encased in amber, the latter of which a movie will do little to ease. His is the rare modern work to be studied like a classic, and that duality can have a strange effect, making him identifiable yet also reinforcing the deity myth.

Though Wallace was fiercely opposed to irony, he also had the (post)modern habit of piling up the layers, and there are many in “End of the Tour.” We are watching Ponsoldt interpret Margulies interpret Lipsky interpret Wallace interpreting the world, and one might ask how the message has been translated or distorted along the way.

Rendering Wallace anew raises other questions. The author famously argued that TV-viewing is the go-to vice of writers, who crave personality observations without the social burdens. Watching the movie, one can’t help wonder what someone so frequently critical of TV’s grip on the culture would make of the medium’s current golden era, when it has an even greater hold but perhaps takes a more novelistic approach.

The ultimate Hollywood-themed thought experiment remains hypothetical, though it does offer some tantalizing possibilities in the mind’s eye. “What would really be fun,” Schaberg said, “is to imagine what David Foster Wallace would write about this movie.”

Which, needless to say, would have been very David Foster Wallace.

Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT

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Steven Zeitchik is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer who covered film and the larger world of Hollywood for the paper from 2009 to 2017, exploring the personalities, issues, content and consequences of both the creative and business (and, increasingly, digital) aspects of our screen entertainment. He previously covered entertainment beats at Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, has contributed arts and culture pieces to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times and has done journalistic tours of duty in Jerusalem and Berlin. While at The Times he has also reported stories in cities ranging from Cairo to Krakow, though Hollywood can still seem like the most exotic destination of all.

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The End of the Tour

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James ponsoldt, jesse eisenberg, jason segel, anna chlumsky, mamie gummer, mickey sumner, and joan cusack.

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The End of the Tour tells the story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter (and novelist) David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace’s groundbreaking epic novel, Infinite Jest . As the days go on, a tenuous yet intense relationship seems to develop between journalist and subject. The two men bob and weave around each other, sharing laughs and also possibly revealing hidden frailties—but it’s never clear how truthful they are being with each other. Ironically, the interview was never published, and five days of audio tapes were packed away in Lipsky’s closet. The two men did not meet again. The film is based on Lipsky’s critically acclaimed memoir about this unforgettable encounter, written following Wallace’s 2008 suicide. Both Segel and Eisenberg reveal great depths of emotion in their performances and the film is directed with humor and tenderness by Sundance vet James Ponsoldt from Pulitzer Prize-winner Donald Margulies’ insightful and heartbreaking screenplay.

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Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel in The End of the Tour.

Sundance 2015 review: The End of the Tour – Jason Segel passes infinite test of playing David Foster Wallace

James Ponsoldt’s compassionate, fascinating – and unauthorised – study of the great, late American novelist focuses on a five day road trip with a foe-turned-bro journo played by Jesse Eisenberg

W hen you first see Jason Segel in The End of the Tour it looks like he’s wearing a David Foster Wallace Halloween costume. The sweats, the longhair peeking out from a bandana, the glasses and the grin. But the only people who would chuckle in recognition are the ones with some degree of familiarity with the great writer’s work. And those who feel they truly grok DFW are wont to say: “He’d have hated this!” Yet the ability to slip into this movie and spend time with a reasonable facsimile of the celebrated author as he puts R.E.M. on his stereo, eats Pop Tarts and eloquently expounds on the pitfalls of modern society is, unquestionably, a delight. Particularly since director James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now, Smashed) is uninterested in any winking 90s nostalgia or even poking for anything juicy to expose. Segel’s Wallace, living alone in a cheap dump out in the middle of nowhere, represents the conflicted, beating heart of self-aware American pop consumerism just waiting for that cholesterol clog to come kill him.

But this is not a David Foster Wallace biopic. It is based on reporter Dave Lipsky’s memoir of spending five days with Wallace during the Infinite Jest publicity tour, 12 years before Wallace’s suicide. Jesse Eisenberg’s Lipsky is a toned-down Salieri, a part that Eisenberg glides into. Lipsky’s books go straight to the remainder bin as he plugs away filing short copy for Rolling Stone magazine. His editor takes pity on him when he begs for the assignment to profile Wallace, of whom he is greatly jealous but recognizes is every bit the genius all the critics say he is.

The bulk of the picture is Lipsky and Wallace just talking – about writing, about television, about technology, relationships, fame and, most importantly, being genuine. Wallace is something of a gentle giant, and as Lipsky digs deeper we learn more about his battles with depression. But Wallace’s narrative refuses to fit into a simple box. He used to drink but wasn’t “a drunk.” His time on suicide watch wasn’t due to a chemical imbalance. What The End of the Tour tries to sell, and sells well, is that Wallace’s big heart was just not made for these times. He’s unable to engage with Lipsky without worrying about three chess moves down the road – about how things will be perceived, and how his reaction to that perception will be perceived. He wears the bandana because he used to live in Tuscon and would sweat. But if he takes it off now he fears people will think he’s doing it because he knows some consider it an affectation. He’s damned either way and is smart enough to recognise he is powerless in the face of image making.

The punchline to all this: Wallace’s estate does not support this film, which is based on Lipsky’s book. Pointing that out in this review may be, as Wallace says early in the movie, “too po-mo and cute,” but it’s hard not to think on this while watching, especially considering how much of the discussion is about wanting to appear like you don’t want to appear in something. Furthermore, the movie would absolutely not work with just “eccentric, erudite writer” as the star. We have to know his work. We have to know just how heavy it was to lug Infinite Jest on the bus. We have to know that he eventually fell to suicide.

Nevertheless, the film is quite touching and, at times, wise. It goes to great lengths not to make Wallace wacky. Ponsoldt has a knack of having his scenes land where you expect them to, but taking a circuitous route. When Wallace and Lipsky meet it’s like a nervous blind date. Later they become bros, joking about women on the road and chomping down junk food. They’ll never see eye-to-eye as writers (as Wallace had few equals) but they ultimately bond as men with ambition. To that end, The End of the Tour is a cautionary tale.

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David Foster Wallace
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David Lipsky on David Foster Wallace and The End of the Tour

Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace in "The End of the Tour"

Jeff Giles is a former Deputy Editor of Entertainment Weekly. His YA novel The Mercy Rule will be published next year by Bloomsbury.

The End of the Tour, out now, is the true story of two thirtysomething writers named David: one, played by a bespectacled and bandana-ed Jason Segel, is the novelist David Foster Wallace, who’s deeply ambivalent about the fame that his new novel Infinite Jest has brought crashing down on his head. (The novel was published in 1996.) The other, played by a relentlessly inquisitive Jesse Eisenberg, is a Rolling Stone reporter named David Lipsky. He’s a struggling author, as it happens, and he’s eager to understand what the makes the newly minted genius tick.

What follows is a week-long road trip, during which the young men size each other up and wrestle over matters both grand (life, authenticity, depression) and mundane (“Die Hard” and junk food). The existential adventure became the basis for Lipsky’s book Although Of Course You End Becoming Yourself , which he published after Wallace’s suicide in 2008, and which is the basis for the movie.

I recently spoke with Lipsky, whom I have known since college in the mid-1980s, about his journey with David Foster Wallace.

TIME: I’ve known you forever, and I have no trouble believing you went through David Foster Wallace’s medicine cabinet looking for secrets because I know how many times you went through my kitchen cabinets looking for junk food.

Actually, David was great on non-healthy eating. Our first morning, he said very solemnly, “Mi Pop Tart es su Pop Tart.” In reality David’s medicine chest was already open, and I was interested to see that he had a tube of Topol, the smoker’s tooth polish. He told me he’d left stuff around—his monthly Cosmo , the big Alanis Morrisette poster—for me to find. I think he wanted me to get a clear sense of what he was like.

I assume you’d read Wallace’s stuff before you knew you’d be interviewing him?

Yes, you actually urged me to read his book of short stories, Girl With Curious Hair , and then Pauline Kael talked about his David Letterman story in The New Yorker . And when David came to New York to edit his Harper’s Magazine pieces, I’d always hear about it. Friends would brag about how DFW had flown in from Illinois, how they talked with him in the hall or walked outside with him to grab sodas. People had started to treasure him even before the bigger books came along, because he was so electric and charming. So, when I got the assignment, I read Infinite Jest and watched the crowds at his New York readings. That was an odd literary experience. There wasn’t even standing room—you just couldn’t get in.

How much did you like his writing at the time? Did you think he’d end up being a fad or did you know his stuff was built to last?

Oh no: He was great. It was one of those moments, like Salinger for the fifties or Fitzgerald and Hemingway a generation before. He was getting our culture exactly right: how it feels right now to be alive. That’s an amazing gift to have and give.

Where did you keep the tapes after the interview? I assume you didn’t know you’d ever use them again.

I saved them in a shoebox, like in the movie. I had a “favorite recorded days” box. There was a tape my brother made of some Joni Mitchell for my mom, Dylan Thomas talking about Christmas, Philip Roth reading from The Ghost Writer —and the tapes of David. I liked to take them out and listen. I’d also kept the transcripts and I read them every few years. The things David said really mattered to me.

The movie really captures what it’s like to be an ambitious young writer hoping to make the kind of mark Wallace made. Do you remember what you wanted out of life when you were 30, like you are in The End of Tour ?

I wanted to earn a living wage and to see something nice about me in the New York Times . I wanted my mother to be proud. I wanted all the things you want and also feel silly for wanting. I wanted readers to say they’d enjoyed something of mine—to see my photo in magazines where I’d seen photos of other writers. I wanted what David in the book calls “the fuss.”

Sometimes, when journalists sit down to write their stories, they rewrite their questions so they sound smarter, and cut all the embarrassing, human stuff they actually did in the moment. If you’d sanitized the interview with Wallace just to make yourself look cooler, there’d be no movie because a movie has to be about two real people.

That was one of the ideas of the book: if it was going to be everything David was doing, it was only fair to include what I was doing too.

In real life, we both sort of forgot what I was doing there: it was two men who liked books in a car eating bad food and talking about who they were and who they wanted to be. That was part of what I wanted to preserve, and what the movie very much does preserve. Among other things, it’s a movie about being young, and when that starts to stop. By the last couple days we spent together, David was the one working the recorder, finding words for just how he wanted to describe his life.

Why did you decide to turn the tapes into a book and did you have any contact with the family?

I did. When Wallace died, Rolling Stone called and asked me to write about him. At first, it was too sad to think about. Then NPR called, and said that when people die by suicide, there’s always the risk of it shading how they’re remembered. One of David’s great gifts is how alive his writing feels, and it seemed that could all go gray. So I talked about him on NPR, and I wrote about how it felt to be around him for Rolling Stone . David’s family read the piece and emailed about my maybe writing something longer. They are wonderful people—as brilliant and alive as David was. I think what they hoped was that he be remembered as a real, living person. And I wanted to write a book that helped. I asked my publisher if I could pause on the other book I was writing, and because they knew it was important to me they were very nice about giving me time. I sent David’s family the manuscript before it went out to my publisher. I said I wouldn’t do it unless they liked it.

When I heard Jesse Eisenberg would be playing you, I thought, Well, he doesn’t look like David, but he does have the same slightly stuttery intellect—like he’s always trying to say way too much all at once. He seemed jittery in exactly the right way.

Thank you. It’s nice to finally know what you think of me! It’s really important that the real-life Jesse is a writer—he writes plays and humor pieces for the New Yorker. He’s sharp, self-doubting, very funny. I first saw him in “The Squid and the Whale,” playing the son of two writers. It was so close to my background and to my own parents’ divorce that Rolling Stone people would say, “Hey, I just saw a movie about you.” Jesse sat down with me and had great questions about how it feels to have a tape recorder running and how to direct a conversation and how you try to find a person inside their words. We met in a diner, coincidentally—like David and I did. And when we walked our check to the cash register, he looked at me and pointed out we aren’t really the same height. I said I thought that would actually be a plus for the story the movie tells. Because of his incredible stature as a writer, David was taller than everybody .

Since Eisenberg plays such a young, raw version of you in the movie, I wished there was a title card at the end that said: “David Lipsky has gotten a lot of what he wished for: He’s written two bestsellers, and won a National Magazine Award. He is now working on an epic book about climate change, and teaches young writers at NYU.”

When I went back and read the book, I noticed how much I yearned to understand what it felt like to get what you wanted: to write a book you knew was good and get back that pleasing cultural grade. But David said a funny thing. He said, “It’d be very interesting to talk to you in a few years. My own experience is that that’s not so—that the more people think that you’re really good, actually the stronger the fear of being a fraud is.” Later, I got to see some of those things myself. I’ve always wished we could have the conversation again from the other side.

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The End of the Tour (2015)

Why didn't david lipsky's interview appear in rolling stone magazine.

In March of 1996, after Lipsky spent five days traveling on the Infinite Jest book tour in Illinois and Minnesota, he was preparing to begin writing his profile on David Foster Wallace. However, the profile never happened. "There had been some heroin troubles in Seattle," said Lipsky during a Center for Fiction speaking engagement , "and so I got reassigned to that story. ...and when I got back and finished the [heroin] story, it was about a month and a half afterwards and it was too late. So I never had to write the piece." As shown in the movie, it wasn't until after David Foster Wallace's suicide in 2008 that Lipsky revisited his recorded interviews with Wallace, which he published in 2010 under the title Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself . -The Center for Fiction The real David Lipsky never wrote his profile on David Foster Wallace for Rolling Stone because he was pulled away for another assignment, and it eventually became too late to do the piece.

Did David Foster Wallace's estate support the making of the movie?

No. In researching The End of the Tour true story, we discovered that the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust conveyed strong opposition to the movie, making it clear that they were never contacted, nor did they give permission to the filmmakers. Upon learning of the movie, they released the following statement, which reads: "The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust, David's family, and David's longtime publisher Little, Brown and Company wish to make it clear that they have no connection with, and neither endorse nor support The End of the Tour . This motion picture is loosely based on transcripts from an interview David consented to eighteen years ago for a magazine article about the publication of his novel, Infinite Jest . That article was never published and David would never have agreed that those saved transcripts could later be repurposed as the basis of a movie. The Trust was given no advance notice that this production was underway and, in fact, first heard of it when it was publicly announced. For the avoidance of doubt, there is no circumstance under which the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust would have consented to the adaptation of this interview into a motion picture, and we do not consider it an homage." -LATimes.com

Did David Foster Wallace really live alone with his dogs in rural Illinois?

Yes, after he had written a significant amount of Infinite Jest , he bought his first house on the outskirts of Bloomington, Illinois and got his first dog, Jeeves, at the pound. Like we see in The End of the Tour movie, he was a bit unkempt but still highly intelligent and insightful. He painted his writing room black and filled it with vintage lamps ( The New Yorker ). Eventually, he did marry, tying the knot with artist Karen Green on December 27, 2004 ( Rolling Stone ). Jason Segel (left) in The End of the Tour movie, and the real David Foster Wallace (right) delivering a 2005 commencement speech .

How accurate are the conversations between David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace in the movie?

The End of the Tour true story reveals that the majority of the conversations in the movie between the author Wallace (Jason Segel) and the journalist Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) were taken almost verbatim from the real David Lipsky's taped conversations with Wallace. -SlashFilm.com

How exactly did David Foster Wallace die?

On September 12, 2008, David Foster Wallace's wife, artist Karen L. Green, returned to their Claremont, California home to find that Wallace had hung himself from a patio rafter. He left a two-page note and prepared part of the manuscript for The Pale King , the novel he had been working on but had not finished ( Every Love Story is a Ghost Story ). His father, James Wallace, said his son had suffered from depression for over twenty years and in June 2007, had stopped taking his primary medication after suffering severe side effects ( The New York Times ). When his depression returned, he underwent electro-convulsive therapy and even tried going back onto his old medication, phenelzine, but it had lost its effectiveness ( Rolling Stone ). Jason Segel (left) portrays David Foster Wallace (right), who committed suicide on September 12, 2008.

When did David Foster Wallace begin suffering from depression?

David Foster Wallace was first diagnosed with depression in the early 1980s when he was an undergraduate at Amherst College. Ever since that time, he had used medication to manage his symptoms ( The New Yorker ). "He had left for college and he came back his sophomore year in the middle of the year unexpectedly," said sister Amy Wallace during an interview with Electric Cereal . "This just stunned all of us. We had absolutely no idea what he was going through and what he was struggling with, and that was a very memorable and difficult time." Amy says that David had been "a very, very volatile and moody teenager," but he was "very, very secretive too." She believes that he had likely been having depression-related feelings in high school, especially in his senior year of high school, and the depression got much worse during college. -Electric Cereal

David Lipsky turned the transcripts of his conversations with the real David Foster Wallace into a book titled Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself . Did travelling with David Foster Wallace really have a profound impact on David Lipsky?

Yes. "Travelling with him was about as much fun as I've had travelling with anybody or ever talking to anybody," says the real David Lipsky. "He was just incredibly awake." -The Center for Fiction

Why did David Lipsky decide to turn his essays into a book after David Foster Wallace died?

"I wanted to think of a way to kind of remind people of what he was like when he was alive," says the real David Lipsky. Following Wallace's death, Lipsky received an email from Wallace's sister, Amy, who said she was being contacted by reporters and fans. She expressed her desire that her brother be remembered as a "real living person." Lipsky decided to write the book as basically a transcript of them talking because he wanted to honor Wallace's fear of having someone write about him and shape the conversation however they wished. The book, titled Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace , became the basis for The End of the Tour movie. -The Center for Fiction

David Foster Wallace's 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest is a satire about the entertainment-obsessed culture in America. What is the novel Infinite Jest about?

At 1,079 pages, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest takes place in a near-future North American dystopia where the United States, Mexico, and Canada form a giant superstate called the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.). The novel is not science fiction but rather falls into the realm of satire, humorously addressing various elements of American culture, including entertainment and addiction, which it suggests adversely affect our ability to think and connect with other people on a meaningful level. What does our indulgence in such pleasures say about who we are as human beings? The characters that bring these philosophical debates to life interact mainly within the novel's two primary locations, a tennis academy and a halfway-house, which turn out to be surprisingly similar.

For more insight into The End of the Tour true story, watch two David Foster Wallace interviews, including a 1997 appearance on Charlie Rose and a candid interview on the German television station ZDF. Then view an interview with the real David Lipsky, portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg in The End of the Tour movie.

The End of the Tour Official Movie Website

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What You Need to Know Before Seeing the David Foster Wallace Biopic

By Jessie Heyman

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The David Foster Wallace biopic, The End of the Tour , finally arrives in theaters next week. The film follows a five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky ( Jesse Eisenberg ) and Wallace ( Jason Segel ) during a 1996 promotional tour for Wallace’s newly published tome, Infinite Jest . Since production began in 2014, the James Ponsoldt –directed film has faced opposition from the late writer’s estate. “The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust, David's family, and David's longtime publisher Little, Brown and Company wish to make it clear that they have no connection with, and neither endorse nor support The End of the Tour ,” reads one statement. Here, a brief breakdown of the estate’s protest.

The Background

In 1996, David Lipsky, a Rolling Stone reporter, was given an assignment to follow author David Foster Wallace, who had newly achieved literary celebrity with the publication of Infinite Jest . After Lipsky followed the author for five days on his book tour, Rolling Stone did not publish the story. After Wallace committed suicide in 2008, Lipsky folded the story into his book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself , which was published in 2010. In February of 2014, it was announced that Sony Pictures had acquired the rights to the adaptation of Lipsky’s book, The End of the Tour .

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The Grievance

Two months after the rights were secured, Wallace’s estate publicly denounced the film, writing, “[Lipsky’s] article was never published and David would never have agreed that those saved transcripts could later be repurposed as the basis of a movie.” The statement went on to say that the trust was given no advanced notice of the film’s production, and that those involved with the film were made aware of the estate’s stance, “yet persisted in capitalizing upon a situation that leaves those closest to David unable to prevent the production.” The statement concluded: “For the avoidance of doubt, there is no circumstance under which the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust would have consented to the adaptation of this interview into a motion picture, and we do not consider it an homage.”

The Takeaway

Though the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust is not known to have filed a legal suit against The End of the Tour , the dispute has raised questions in literary circles . While anti-defamation laws don’t extend to the deceased, Wallace’s estate owns the rights to the author’s work , which could arguably extend to the taped interview Wallace gave to Lipsky back in 1996. (Taped interviews are a legal gray area.) But it’s in the court of public opinion that the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust has taken action. The verdict? We’ll know next week.

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'The End of the Tour' Offers A Hint Of David Foster Wallace's Inner Struggle

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The new movie "The End Of The Tour" is adapted from a series of interviews between the novelist David Foster Wallace and a Rolling Stone reporter after the publication of Wallace's 1996 novel, "Infinite Jest," the book that made him a literary celebrity. Twelve years later, Wallace killed himself. Our film critic David Edelstein has a review of "The End Of The Tour."

DAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: The tour in "The End Of The Tour" is based on David Foster Wallace's 1996 multi-city book promotion for his epic novel, "Infinite Jest." And its end is the Midwest where Wallace, played by Jason Segel, is accompanied by Rolling Stone magazine writer David Lipsky, played by Jesse Eisenberg, who's writing a profile of him. The actual profile was never finished, but after Wallace's 2008 suicide, Lipsky transcribed his interviews and published a book with the Wallace-like title, "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself." I don't think the book is especially revelatory. Wallace is extremely self-conscious, and many of Lipsky's questions center on what it feels like to be a hot writer instead of the peculiar scramble of Wallace's book, "Infinite Jest." But it's good enough to be the basis for a very good movie. "The End Of The Tour" is essentially a two-character piece - a sort of "My Dinner With Andre" on the road that evokes the fuzziness of Wallace's emotional life and his discomfort with being interviewed. Jason Segel, with long messy hair and the trademark Wallace bandana, makes Wallace's self-consciousness expressive, even eloquent. Much of his writing centers on how people struggle to present themselves. And in a diner opposite Lipsky, Wallace raises the whole meta-question of what is an interview?

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE END OF THE TOUR")

JASON SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) You know what I would love to do, man? I would love to do a profile on one of you guys who's doing a profile on me.

JESSE EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) That is interesting.

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) Is that too pomo (ph) and cute? I don't know.

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) Maybe for Rolling Stone but...

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) It would be interesting though.

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) You think?

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) I'm sorry, man.

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) What's wrong?

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) It's just you're going to go back to New York and, like, sit at your desk and shape this thing however you want. And that, I mean, to me, it's just extremely disturbing.

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) Why is it disturbing?

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) 'Cause I think I would like to shape the impression of me that's coming across.

EISENBERG: (As David Lipsky) I see. I understand that.

SEGEL: (As David Foster Wallace) I don't even know if I like you yet - so nervous about whether you like me.

EDELSTEIN: There it is; Wallace studies Lipsky studying Wallace while Lipsky labors to find his story. Does all this sound too pointy-headed? "The End Of The Tour" doesn't play that way. Screenwriter Donald Margulies is an accomplished playwright, and he's alert to every subtle, awkward negotiation for power. The director, James Ponsoldt, keeps the action loosely framed. These guys aren't pretending to hang out. But there's no dead air, everything is fraught. Wallace tells Lipsky he doesn't want to be seen as the kind of person who'd want to be in Rolling Stone. He's afraid of celebrity, of becoming a cog in a culture that in "Infinite Jest" he likens to a drug. But he also says he wants it to be easier to go home with women after his book readings. He wants it, and he doesn't. He's self-deprecating as a way of hiding his competitiveness. Jesse Eisenberg, by contrast, puts Lipsky's competitiveness on the surface. When he interviewed Wallace, Lipsky had just published a novel to resounding silence. And Eisenberg shows him oscillating between jealousy of Wallace's sudden fame and a desire to live vicariously through it. Their contest comes to a head when they meet up at the Mall of America in suburban Minneapolis with two female friends of Wallace's played by Mamie Gummer and Mickey Sumner. In a series of exquisitely orchestrated scenes, Wallace picks up on Lipsky's subtle sexual moves on Sumner and begins to seethe. Not all of "The End Of The Tour" is so understated. The movie cooks up a bogus moral issue - will Lipsky follow the crude orders of his crude editor and ask Wallace if he'd been addicted to heroin? It's a nonstarter. And the pacing falters in later scenes when Lipsky and Wallace are quietly enraged at each other. But even at its draggiest, the film makes you feel lucky to be in the same room as David Foster Wallace. And I was once at his first big event in 1996 at a packed East Village bar called KGB. He read two sections of "Infinite Jest" in an even, deadpan meter that made every absurdity sound utterly logical. I wish "The End Of The Tour" gave a sense of what it was like to hear Wallace read. The filmmakers cutaway whenever he's about to. I know that prose can seem static and overly literary on screen. But I think Jason Segel could have used it as a springboard into the labyrinth of Wallace's mind. Why not show David Foster Wallace in the one arena in which he could be perfectly understood?

GROSS: David Edelstein is film critic for New York magazine. If you'd like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like the ones with actor Jake Gyllenhaal, comics Bobcat Goldthwait and Barry Crimmins, actor Ian McKellen and Teresa Ann Miller who trains dogs for movies and TV shows, check out our podcast. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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'End Of The Tour': An Unauthorized 'Anti-Biopic' Of David Foster Wallace

Jason Segel plays writer David Foster Wallace in the new film The End of the Tour . A24 Films hide caption

Jason Segel plays writer David Foster Wallace in the new film The End of the Tour .

The late David Foster Wallace still casts a long shadow over the literary world almost seven years after his suicide at age 46. Wallace is the subject of a new movie, The End of the Tour , which opens Thursday in New York and Los Angeles. The film depicts Wallace at a big moment in his career: It's 1996, he's just turned 34, and he's on a publicity tour for his breakthrough novel, Infinite Jest . In the midst of all that, Rolling Stone sends a reporter to interview Wallace and the pair spend five days talking and arguing about fame, depression, pop culture and junk food.

Jason Segel plays Wallace in the film. He says, "What I'm really proud of about this movie is that I think it's an extension of the themes that David Foster Wallace was really trying hard to express in his writing."

Wallace was known for dense books that ask a lot of the reader. Infinite Jest runs to more than 1,000 pages, including hundreds of endnotes and sentences that sometimes stretch on for pages. But Wallace was also funny, smart and an incredibly sharp observer of the world around him.

David Lipsky, the reporter Rolling Stone sent to interview Wallace, says, "He's not the way you imagine writers. He is someone who is engaging with the exact same world that you are engaging with."

Lipsky's Rolling Stone story was never published, but when Wallace died in 2008, Lipsky wrote an essay about him for NPR. Eventually, Lipsky put his interviews together in a book called Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself .

Remembrances

Wallace invented 'new style, new comedy'.

Foster Wallace: An Ordinary Guy Who Couldn't Be

"I loved his work," Lipsky says. "And he was an electrically charming man to be around. And so I tried as much as possible when writing prose about him to do it in his own words. The way the book works is it starts when I turn the tape machine on — when I walk into his house — and it stops when I went home. It is just what David wanted to talk about."

A lot of the dialogue in the film is based on these interviews, and some of it is adapted directly from Lipsky's tapes. Director James Ponsoldt says, "In many ways we were aiming to do something that was an anti-biopic. Because we were just telling a very narrow slice of time — of David Foster Wallace for several days in 1996 — it allowed us to focus on, you know, a narrow window and hopefully go deep during that time."

In the film, Wallace comes off as a guy who is deeply ambivalent about accolades and fame, and whether his newfound celebrity will get in the way of his writing. That same ambivalence comes through in this 1996 interview with WNYC's Leonard Lopate:

"Part of the book is sort of about a culture of kind of attention and hype and image and stuff. And so there are a number of complicated ironies about this. And I also — I mean, writers are combinations of very shy people and egomaniacs."

But according to Alex Kohner, co-trustee (along with Wallace's widow) of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust, Wallace would not have wanted to be the subject of a movie, and the trust doesn't approve of the film. "This movie wouldn't have been made if David was alive," Kohner says. "We are very interested in people reading David Wallace's work, which we feel is the best way to learn about him and to remember him. We are not interested in selling David Wallace the person, because he would have hated that."

But Wallace can't speak for himself, which leaves his trust with limited legal options.

Ponsoldt, the director, insists that everyone involved in the movie did it for the right reasons. "This film was made with so much love and empathy for David Foster Wallace's writing, for what it's meant to us," he says. "We made it with very sincere intentions."

Lipsky says, "I wanted people to know that he was not just someone who committed suicide, but someone who had written the best stuff of the last 20 years. And I wanted to say, 'Hey, here is what this person was like.' "

And if more people decide to pick up Infinite Jest and Wallace's other books because of this film, Lipsky says, that would be the best homage.

IMAGES

The End Of The Tour
Jason Segel As David Foster Wallace In The End Of The Tour (2015
The End Of The Tour
Review: The End of the Tour
Review: ‘The End of the Tour’ Offers a Tale of Two Davids
How 'End of the Tour' became a very David Foster Wallace kind of film

VIDEO

Ticket to the Fair by David Foster Wallace
Detour Ahead (Take 2 / Live At The Village Vanguard / 1961)
David Foster Wallace on Leo Tolstoy
Journey
Biff's World / 27th Floor (From “Back To The Future Pt. II” Original Score)
16

COMMENTS

The End of the Tour
The End of the Tour is a 2015 American drama film about writer David Foster Wallace.The film stars Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg, was written by Donald Margulies, and was directed by James Ponsoldt.Based on David Lipsky's best-selling memoir Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, screenwriter Margulies first read the book in 2011, and sent it to Ponsoldt, a former student of his ...
The End of the Tour (2015)
The End of the Tour: Directed by James Ponsoldt. With Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Segel, Anna Chlumsky, Mamie Gummer. The story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace, which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace's groundbreaking epic novel, 'Infinite Jest.'
Why The End of the Tour isn't really about my friend David Foster Wallace
Pietsch's statement did not prevent the newspaper from titling the piece "How End of the Tour became a very David Foster Wallace kind of film". It proceeds to slather praise upon the film ...
'The End of the Tour' Offers A Hint Of David Foster Wallace's ...
DAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: The tour in "The End Of The Tour" is based on David Foster Wallace's 1996 multi-city book promotion for his epic novel, "Infinite Jest." And its end is the Midwest where ...
The End of the Tour
Rated 2/5 Stars • Rated 2 out of 5 stars 03/30/23 Full Review robert r Can confirm that even those who are generally unfamiliar with the life and times of David Foster Wallace can find enjoyment ...
Watch The End of the Tour
The End of the Tour. HD. A journalist interviews author David Foster Wallace at the conclusion of the promotional tour for his sprawling novel Infinite Jest. 1,296 IMDb 7.2 1 h 46 min 2015. X-Ray HDR UHD R. Drama · Cerebral · Compelling · Philosophical. Free trial of Cinemax, rent, or buy.
Review: 'The End of the Tour' Offers a Tale of Two Davids
Directed by James Ponsoldt. Biography, Drama. R. 1h 46m. By A.O. Scott. July 30, 2015. "There's an unhappy paradox about literary biographies," David Foster Wallace observed in The New York ...
The End of the Tour movie review (2015)
What it definitely isn't is a biography of David Foster Wallace, much less a celebration of his work and worldview. Whether that proves a deal breaker, a bonus, or a non-factor for viewers will depend on what they want out of this movie. "The End of the Tour" is not really about Wallace (Jason Segel), although he's the other major character.
How 'End of the Tour' became a very David Foster Wallace kind of film
Author David Foster Wallace on March 18, 1996. Right after the new road movie "The End of the Tour" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, a movie-industry friend texted me her ...
The End of the Tour
The End of the Tour tells the story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter (and novelist) David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace's groundbreaking epic novel, Infinite Jest.As the days go on, a tenuous yet intense relationship seems to develop between journalist ...
'The End Of The Tour' Is A Film For David Foster Wallace Buffs
'The End Of The Tour' Is A Film For David Foster Wallace Buffs The movie, which draws from journalist David Lipsky's interviews with Wallace in 1996, offers an intriguing (if not altogether ...
Sundance 2015 review: The End of the Tour
W hen you first see Jason Segel in The End of the Tour it looks like he's wearing a David Foster Wallace Halloween costume. The sweats, the longhair peeking out from a bandana, the glasses and ...
David Foster Wallace: The 'Fresh Air' Interview : NPR
David Foster Wallace: The 'Fresh Air' Interview In 1996, Wallace's novel Infinite Jest was a critical and popular success. The new movie The End of The Tour recreates the author's tour for that book.
David Lipsky on David Foster Wallace and The End of the Tour
The End of the Tour, out now, is the true story of two thirtysomething writers named David: one, played by a bespectacled and bandana-ed Jason Segel, is the novelist David Foster Wallace, who's ...
The End Of The Tour
SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/A24subscribeJason Segel talks about pouring his hopes, fears and anxieties into his performance in The End of the Tour -- Now availa...
The End of the Tour
The End of the Tour tells the story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter (and novelist) David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace's groundbreaking epic novel, Infinite Jest. As the days go on, a tenuous yet intense relationship seems to develop between journalist ...
The End of the Tour Movie vs True Story of David Foster Wallace
The book, titled Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, became the basis for The End of the Tour movie. -The Center for Fiction David Foster Wallace's 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest is a satire about the entertainment-obsessed culture in America.
The End of the Tour: What you Need to Know
The David Foster Wallace biopic, The End of the Tour, finally arrives in theaters next week.The film follows a five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) and ...
'The End of the Tour' is a filmed chapter in the David Foster Wallace
James Ponsoldt's new film "The End of the Tour," starring Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel. (. A24. ) After Wallace committed suicide in 2008, a book was published about a five-day road trip he ...
The End of the Tour
At the end of his interview, David Lipsky asks David Foster Wallace about his rumored heroin addiction, which angers Wallace.
'The End of the Tour' Offers A Hint Of David Foster Wallace's Inner
DAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: The tour in "The End Of The Tour" is based on David Foster Wallace's 1996 multi-city book promotion for his epic novel, "Infinite Jest." And its end is the Midwest where ...
The End of The Tour: scene 13 -- "Spiritual Crisis"
This scene stars David Foster Wallace (... This is just a very short cut of a clip from a film titled The End of The Tour -- based off of the best selling book. This scene stars David Foster ...
'End Of The Tour': An Unauthorized 'Anti-Biopic' Of David Foster Wallace
The late David Foster Wallace still casts a long shadow over the literary world almost seven years after his suicide at age 46. Wallace is the subject of a new movie, The End of the Tour, which ...

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