Summary

The Singing Detective tells the story of crime novelist Dan Dark (Robert Downey Jr.) who, languishing in his hospital bed, occupies his time by mapping out a screenplay in his head about a cynical private investigator who doubles as a singer in a dance band. His lead character is slowly drawn into a web of intrigue during the murder investigation of a prostitute in 1950's Los Angeles. Heavily medicated, the border between reality and fiction starts to blur in Dark's mind. The plot is woven together with his own painful childhood memories, and soon he is living in a fevered film-noir hell constructed by his own twisted psyche, where everyone is his enemy and no one can be trusted. Mel Gibson co-stars as the enigmatic Dr. Gibbon, the hospital psychiatrist who dares to take on Dark's tortured mind. In Keith Gordon's The Singing Detective, re-imagined by Dennis Potter from his classic British miniseries, Dan Dark is a character who gives new meaning to the term "scars of childhood." A hack writer of detective stories, he has suffered from psoriatic arthropathy, a crippling disease of the skin and bones, from the time he was eight-years-old. His latest and worst outbreak has landed him in the hospital where he deliriously tries to figure out who he is and how he got to this terrible place in his life. As his fevered mind mingles real people with his fictional characters, and his past with his present, the film moves in and out of three worlds. There is the present day hospital where Dark is prodded by indifferent doctors and bossy nurses. As one of the bright spots in his bleak life, the kindly Nurse Mills (Katie Holmes) greases his sore body leading to an unexpected comic climax. As his condition grows more desperate, he is dispatched to the charge of the eccentric psychiatrist Dr. Gibbons (Mel Gibson). Initially reluctant to confront his tortured past, Dark is gradually lured out from the "cave in the rocks" under which his spirit has crawled. Dark is visited in the hospital by his ex-wife (Robin Wright Penn), whom he fears his sleeping with a character from his past and conspiring to steal the screenplay he wrote years ago of his first novel, The Singing Detective. But nothing is exactly what it appears here. In his hallucinatory state, Dark re-imagines the plot of his novel, casting himself in the starring role of a gumshoe who doubles as a singer in a dance band. The fictional story, a sordid film noir, has something to do with a smarmy character, Mark Binney (Jeremy Northam), who employs hookers to extort atomic secrets from scientists, and then disposes of the girls with the help of two hapless thugs (Adrian Brody and Jon Polito). As a coverup, Binney hires Dark to solve the murder case. Sex and violence are the clues and they lead Dark straight to his childhood. Dark can't keep his mind from remembering his tortured youth growing up in his parents' gas station in the California desert. When young Danny watches his mother (Carla Gugino) seduced by his father's partner (Northam again), the seeds are planted for a lifelong disgust with sex and hatred of women. Mother and child are forced to flee to Los Angeles where things get even worse. It's here that the poison in Dark's mind starts to erupt on his skin. The stories Dark tells himself in the hospital are rooted in the 50's rock-n- roll he heard as a kid, so in his feverish imagination characters can break into song and dance at any moment, lip-synching to the original music. The walls of Dark's hospital room open and the doctors and nurses do the hand jive to "At the Hop." Dark imagines a romance with Nurse Mills to the strains of "Mr. Sandman." And the thugs try to knock off the Signing Detective in a club as he croons "Poison Ivy" from the bandstand. The Singing Detective smashes together black comedy, pulp fiction, naturalistic drama, expressionist film noir and lip-synched 1950's rock-n-roll musical numbers in a totally original and multi-leveled exploration of a wounded soul as he heals and reassembles the jumbled pieces of his life.