The Book of Clarence

An often astonishingly tedious misfire, The Book of Clarence follows LaKeith Stanfield’s title character as he achieves a fair degree of notoriety after passing himself off as the Messiah. It’s intriguing subject matter that is, right from the word go, employed to intolerable, endless effect by Jeymes Samuel, as the writer/director delivers a smug and wildly overlong trainwreck that remains perpetually unable to capture the viewer’s interest even fleetingly – with the arms-length atmosphere perpetuated (and sustained) by a continuing reliance on elements of a decidedly underwhelming (and disagreeable) nature. (Nothing here works, from the aggressively irreverent narrative to the tiresome emphasis on head-scratching inside jokes to Samuel’s grating, obnoxious score.) There’s little doubt, as such, that the episodic structure, in which Samuel emphasizes digressions of an almost uniformly pointless nature (eg Clarence and friends get high, literally), paves the way for a midsection completely (and astonishingly) devoid of forward momentum, and it’s clear, too, that the interminable final stretch ensures that The Book of Clarence peters out to a hopelessly palpable degree – with the end result a pervasively wrongheaded disaster that feels so much longer than its 129 minute running time.

no stars out of ****