Rebel in the Rye Movie Review

Rebel in the Rye (2017)

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Written by: Danny Strong, Kenneth Slawenski (book)
Directed by: Danny Strong
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Kevin Spacey, Victor Garber, Zoey Deutch, Lucy Boynton
Rated: PG-13
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Plot
The life of celebrated but reclusive author, J.D. Salinger, who gained worldwide fame with the publication of his novel "The Catcher in the Rye".

Verdict
While it contains nearly all the typical contentions an artist faces, it blends them well. This is the struggle of an artist. Salinger's father worried he wouldn't make enough money to survive. He struggled to get published and then wrote a novel no one wanted to publish. After creating a cultural touchstone everyone asked him to write another. He had a passion, but he neglected much to fuel it. This truncates his life after his seminal book, making it seem like he locked himself away to write stories no one would ever see.
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Review
This is a great look at what it takes to be a writer, or an artist. His father saw writing as a means to a difficult end. Only his mother supported him.
He had the tenacity to push through and be better, but did he want to be better or just crave validation, wishing to prove his father wrong? Early on Salinger had a constant need of approval. He also had to balance artistry with business. Do you sell out to get published? Sometimes you have to bend.

He manages to write a book that overtakes pop culture, and then everyone wants the next one. He just wrote a seminal book, putting everything he had into it, and people want more. You can see this begins his split with the public. They want more, but what does he have left?
What pushed him into isolation were the people showing up at his apartment claiming to be Holden. His book struck such a chord with people and that's a rare thing, but it can bring out obsessive fans.

Salinger was obsessive. First with getting published then with writing. Writing superseded everything, even his family. You need that drive to make it, but he hurt a lot of people along the way when he didn't need to. He was self absorbed and that's part of being an artist. There was just no room in his life for anything but writing. He slowly pushed everything else out to become a true writer by writing for nothing in return. While the movie makes it seem like he never published again, and it was that first book that financed such a lifestyle, he did publish two more collections though he had to have written much more.

The question the movie leaves to the viewer is if he wrote for all those years, what happened to those stories? The movie should have mentioned that. While it's a fair summary of Salinger's life up to The Catcher in the Rye, it omits a fair amount after, downplaying his zeal for different religions, aggressive privacy requirements, and ignoring his later marriages.
His first wife stated that he would scrap many of his stories after learning of a new belief system. He had been into yoga as the movie depicts, but also a number of spiritual, medical, and nutritional belief systems while also having met L. Ron Hubbard. Salinger's wife speculated that he may have scrapped the stories because they lacked quality or he just couldn't face publishing them.