Underrated Movie of the Week: Robert Downey Jr. in “The Singing Detective”

On the heels of the news that Robert Downey Jr. has been cast in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes update, it’s time to revisit a little-seen film where he had previously played a sleuth, albeit the private dick variety: The Singing Detective, directed by Keith Gordon, whom you may remember as Jason Melon from Back to School (which also featured Downey, by the way).

Based on <a href=”Dennis Potter’s 1987 BBC miniseries starring Michael Gambon and adapted for the screen by Potter himself before he died, the film is a bit of a mind-breaker. It tells the parallel stories of pulp writer Dan Dark’s painful therapy for the latest outbreak of his horrendous skin-and-bone disease psoriatic arthropathy, his tortured childhood trauma and the hallucinatory adventures of ace gumshoe Dan Dark’s world of crooners, mobsters and betrayals. It’s never clear what’s real and what’s imagined in Dark’s fevered consciousness, and he’s sent to a strange psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Gibbon (producer Mel Gibson, who takes advantage of the opportunity to not be Mel Gibson and completely disappears into the role of the bald, eccentric enigma) where the roots of Dark’s psychosis start to unfurl.

Robin Wright Penn stars as Dark’s ex-wife, who doubles as a character in his film noir fever dreams - as does his nurse (Katie Holmes) and his mother (Carla Gugino). It’s a challenging movie that you’ll likely need to watch more than once, and it’s further proof that Downey can do anything.

Watch the trailer for The Singing Detective, starring Robert Downey Jr., Mel Gibson, Robin Wright Penn, Carla Gugino, Adrien Brody, Katie Holmes, Jon Polito, Alfre Woodard and Jeremy Northam.
Also check Downey out in the noir comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, where he tries and fails to be a detective.