How much you like Beau is Afraid might depend on your tolerance for representations of abjection. That is, watching Joaquin Phoenix as Beau breaking down psychologically over what appears to be the violent chaos of society, plus the death of his loathsome mother (Patti LuPone). Beau is almost always shown cowering, cringing, screaming, vomiting, enduring every kind of sad and screechy mortification, and fleeing from surreal dangers that might be real or all in his mind or in some ambiguous area between the two. There are perhaps twenty minutes total, sprinkled through the latter half of the film, when Beau expresses something else — rage, ecstasy, anything — but the rest of the three hours is Beau abased by his fears.

There’s an implied capitalist critique in the eventual revelation that Beau’s mother, Mona Wasserman, was a business tycoon who made her miserable, lonely son the focal point of all the MW Corporation products generated and sold, with his photos at the center of the ad campaign. This critique seems tangentially reminiscent of Orson Welles’s take on his own film Citizen Kane as being a character study of a boy whose “parents were a bank.”

But whereas every phase of Charles Foster Kane’s development seems to add layers of complexity to his character, the portrayal of Beau Wasserman’s mass of neurotic fears never grows more complex or insightful. There’s an irony in the way MW products tend to emphasize safety, given that Beau never feels safe. But beyond that, Beau’s weeping and keening and running away become tiresome early on.