Joseph Gordon

So Full of Himself, Yet Running on Empty

Joseph Gordon-Levitt Stars in ‘Don Jon’

Once upon a time “Don Jon” had the unhappy title “Don Jon’s Addiction.” That was in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where the movie had its premiere. But addiction, which conjures up drunks, druggies and roads to recovery taken 12 steps at a time, felt at odds with the skittering, upbeat cadences and feel of “Don Jon,” an often exuberant movie about a man hooked on pornography who can’t deal with the breathing, desiring women who end up in his bed.

The actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt is directing his first feature film, an edgy romantic comedy he stars in and also wrote.

So now the title just suggests Don Juan, the fictional Spanish libertine whose womanizing ways lead to — depending on who tells or sings the tale — comic and tragic fates, including a descent into hell and an ascent into redemptive love. And while addiction may make Jon sound like a bummer, as played with great swagger and subterranean wit by the movie’s writer and director, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, this improbable charmer conveys convincingly triumphant braggadocio. That’s true even if all Jon cares about, as he repeatedly claims in a voice-over that sounds like a loop, are ‘“my body, my pad, my ride, my family, my church, my boys, my girls, my porn.” That’s a whole lot of me and mine.

Which is directly to the point of this deceptively sincere movie about masculinity and its discontents that Mr. Gordon-Levitt, making a fine feature directing debut, shapes into a story about a young man’s moral education. That schooling begins the night that Jon, a New Jersey bartender and a regular at a club throbbing with beats and bodies, first sees Barbara Sugarman (a superb Scarlett Johansson), who’s setting the room ablaze in a scorching red dress. After he and his friends, the diminutive sounding Bobby and Danny (Rob Brown and Jeremy Luke) debate her beauty using their usual crude methodology — Jon deems her a dime, or a 10 — he makes his well-practiced move. What he fails to grasp is that the moment he locks eyes with Barbara, he’s no longer the hunter but the prey.

Barbara has her own addiction, specifically to the kind of storybook romance that, the movie suggests, reduces human relations to commercial transactions as much as pornography does. Mr. Gordon-Levitt has fun with this idea (and with cameos from Anne Hathaway and Channing Tatum) without fully developing it. “Don Jon” takes women seriously, but like a lot of contemporary American movies, including many romantic comedies, it’s mostly interested in what it means to be a feeling, thinking man in a world in which many of the old certainties have disappeared. Each time Jon sits down to a family dinner — his mother (Glenne Headly) bustling in the kitchen as his father (Tony Danza) waits at the table — the comedy feels almost ethnographic, as if you were watching a soon-to-be-extinct tribe.

At times, Mr. Gordon-Levitt almost smothers his intelligent movie in jokes, as with the repeated references to Jon’s pad, his ride, his girls and boys, all of which register fairly soon as markers or even trophies of an obsessively cultivated narcissism. With his pumped physique and shellacked hair, his tight pants and hard jaw, Jon is as much a walking, talking cartoon as the representations he onanistically worships, so it’s fitting that the movie opens with an actual animation. It’s the first in a flurry of equally cartoonish images, now of real women, which flash across the screen and, as the pace of the editing accelerates, turn into a flurry of pneumatic breasts, bulbous buttocks and cavernous mouths. It’s a kind of dismemberment by montage, although here it’s finally Jon who’s in pieces.

To a degree, “Don Jon” echoes an idea that the film theorist Linda Williams advances toward the end of “Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ ” her revolutionary feminist study of pornographic films and their contradictions. “Pornography as a genre wants to be about sex,” Ms. Williams writes. “On close inspection, however, it always proves to be more about gender.” Mr. Gordon-Levitt effectively translates that thesis into funny, eventually touching and dramatic terms in his movie, which shifts registers when Jon meets an almost ghostly older woman, Esther (a tender, true Julianne Moore). After presenting him with a 1970s Danish pornographic film directed by a woman, Esther offers Jon something more valuable and, just maybe, deliverance.

“Don Jon” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Female and male nudity.

Don Jon

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt; edited by Lauren Zuckerman; production design by Meghan Rogers; costumes by Leah Katznelson; produced by Ram Bergman; released by Relativity. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

WITH: Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Jon Martello Jr.), Scarlett Johansson (Barbara Sugarman), Julianne Moore (Esther), Tony Danza (Jon Martello Sr.), Rob Brown (Bobby), Glenne Headly (Angela Martello), Brie Larson (Monica Martello) and Jeremy Luke (Danny).

Well this is embarrassing…
Who told Joseph Gordon-Levitt our sexy secret?!?
LOLz!
Honestly, who HASN'T had a JGL fantasy? Especially lately! That boy is looking better than ever these days!
Joe knows he's one desirable dude too because last night, he admitted to Stephen Colbert that he's aware people are masturbating to him!
ZOMG!
Stephen was asking Joe about his Don Jon character's inability to take his mind off of porn even while having sex with Scarlet Johansson! Mr. Colbert told a bold-faced lie and claimed not to masturbate to porn EVER, because as he put it:

"Pornography masturbates to me!"

Whatever you say, Stephen!
Joseph then interjected:

"People masturbate to me!"

Truer words have never been spoken!
HA!
Ch-ch-check out Joseph Gordon-Levitt letting it all hang out on The Colbert Report…AFTER THE JUMP!!!
- See more at: http://perezhilton.com/2013-09-26-joseph-gordon-levitt-knows-that-people-are-masturbating-to-him#sthash.MU1GGGoe.dpuf