Synopsis
The Singing Detective (2003) is Keith Gordon's musical crime drama, available to watch online on iFILM. Robert Downey Jr. plays a hack pulp novelist pinned to a hospital bed by a brutal skin disease.
Feverish and in agony, Dan Dark escapes into his own fiction, casting himself as the cold-eyed gumshoe from his paperbacks. The line between the ward and his imagination dissolves — doctors and visitors break into vintage pop numbers, and his wife (Robin Wright) seems to be plotting with a stranger to steal his screenplay. Mel Gibson, bald and bespectacled past recognition, turns up as the shrink trying to pull Dark out of the spiral.
Dennis Potter adapted his own landmark 1986 BBC serial, shifting the action from England to the States. It's a divisive watch: the mockery, the pain and the song-and-dance are blended on purpose to grate, and the mismatch will either repel you or hook you. Katie Holmes, Adrien Brody and Jeremy Northam fill out the cast. Stream The Singing Detective (2003) online on iFILM.
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