Jimmy Quinn is a veteran of stand-up comedy's glory days; he is also an alcoholic. His life changes when his son David, who he abandoned as a child, shows up at his door, professing his desire to be a stand-up comedian.
Ultimately, Stanhope deserves a better vehicle for his style and tone of comedy. Still, I guess it's not entirely unsalvagable: heavily snip the editing to make the interactions less stilted and to inject some pace into the jokes; swap out the cheesy pseudo-noir soundtrack; and fix the mixing for the background noise so that it doesn't fade-in and fade-out when the actors are between sentences. However, what is unfixable is the unmotivated camera movements (eg. those horizontal right-to-left pans during table scenes) and Des Mulrooney's over-the-top facial acting that seems to be directly channelled from Greg Sestero's performance in The Room (2009). Furthermore, it is rather unfortunate that the only comedian that Jimmy openly (and quite viscerally) disliked to their face was Black… Anyway, although the final scene of the movie didn't give the audience the cheesy feel-good ending I was dreading, ultimately, Stanhope really merits a better film. Why not adapt Sam Tallent's Running the Light?
