THEY’VE GOT THE FINEST HOME MOVIES THAT YOU HAVE EVER SEEN: Did you know that Less Than Zero is a Christmas movie? It’s festive and totally appropriate!

No, it’s actually a 1987 adaptation of a Bret Ellis novel; Robert Downey Jr. plays a downward-spiraling coke addict, which was, let’s say, a triumph of method acting. It’s set in LA, it opens with this song, it’s glossy and Swatch-colored from start to finish, its dialogue is on-the-nose (“Did you girls know that you have television sets between your legs?”), and all the players deliver their lines in a kind of actressy drunken rant. I get why people might watch this for camp value. But I loved it pretty unreservedly and found it genuinely painful to watch. Downey is terrific, and Jamie Gertz and Andrew McCarthy (I know!) worked really well because they always sounded fake–they sounded like people who weren’t sure how to say the things they had to say. The movie hits very hard on something David Carr also writes really powerfully about in The Night of the Gun: When you’ve broken a sufficient number of promises, to yourself or to others, there’s no way to speak words that can be trusted, and the attempt to do so only makes you more painfully aware of your own untrustworthiness.

The ending is OTT in a way I didn’t care for (eta: it’s really AfterSchool Special-ish), but whatever, I’m not trying to defend this movie to you. I’m trying to say that I got a lot from what it was doing.