end of the tour jason segel

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The End of the Tour

Where to watch.

Rent The End of the Tour on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Brilliantly performed and smartly unconventional, The End of the Tour pays fitting tribute to a singular talent while offering profoundly poignant observations on the human condition.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

James Ponsoldt

Jesse Eisenberg

David Lipsky

Jason Segel

David Foster Wallace

Becky Ann Baker

Anna Chlumsky

Joan Cusack

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Movie news & guides, this movie is featured in the following articles., critics reviews.

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Sundance 2015 review: The End of the Tour – Jason Segel passes infinite test of playing David Foster Wallace

James Ponsoldt’s compassionate, fascinating – and unauthorised – study of the great, late American novelist focuses on a five day road trip with a foe-turned-bro journo played by Jesse Eisenberg

W hen you first see Jason Segel in The End of the Tour it looks like he’s wearing a David Foster Wallace Halloween costume. The sweats, the longhair peeking out from a bandana, the glasses and the grin. But the only people who would chuckle in recognition are the ones with some degree of familiarity with the great writer’s work. And those who feel they truly grok DFW are wont to say: “He’d have hated this!” Yet the ability to slip into this movie and spend time with a reasonable facsimile of the celebrated author as he puts R.E.M. on his stereo, eats Pop Tarts and eloquently expounds on the pitfalls of modern society is, unquestionably, a delight. Particularly since director James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now, Smashed) is uninterested in any winking 90s nostalgia or even poking for anything juicy to expose. Segel’s Wallace, living alone in a cheap dump out in the middle of nowhere, represents the conflicted, beating heart of self-aware American pop consumerism just waiting for that cholesterol clog to come kill him.

But this is not a David Foster Wallace biopic. It is based on reporter Dave Lipsky’s memoir of spending five days with Wallace during the Infinite Jest publicity tour, 12 years before Wallace’s suicide. Jesse Eisenberg’s Lipsky is a toned-down Salieri, a part that Eisenberg glides into. Lipsky’s books go straight to the remainder bin as he plugs away filing short copy for Rolling Stone magazine. His editor takes pity on him when he begs for the assignment to profile Wallace, of whom he is greatly jealous but recognizes is every bit the genius all the critics say he is.

The bulk of the picture is Lipsky and Wallace just talking – about writing, about television, about technology, relationships, fame and, most importantly, being genuine. Wallace is something of a gentle giant, and as Lipsky digs deeper we learn more about his battles with depression. But Wallace’s narrative refuses to fit into a simple box. He used to drink but wasn’t “a drunk.” His time on suicide watch wasn’t due to a chemical imbalance. What The End of the Tour tries to sell, and sells well, is that Wallace’s big heart was just not made for these times. He’s unable to engage with Lipsky without worrying about three chess moves down the road – about how things will be perceived, and how his reaction to that perception will be perceived. He wears the bandana because he used to live in Tuscon and would sweat. But if he takes it off now he fears people will think he’s doing it because he knows some consider it an affectation. He’s damned either way and is smart enough to recognise he is powerless in the face of image making.

The punchline to all this: Wallace’s estate does not support this film, which is based on Lipsky’s book. Pointing that out in this review may be, as Wallace says early in the movie, “too po-mo and cute,” but it’s hard not to think on this while watching, especially considering how much of the discussion is about wanting to appear like you don’t want to appear in something. Furthermore, the movie would absolutely not work with just “eccentric, erudite writer” as the star. We have to know his work. We have to know just how heavy it was to lug Infinite Jest on the bus. We have to know that he eventually fell to suicide.

Nevertheless, the film is quite touching and, at times, wise. It goes to great lengths not to make Wallace wacky. Ponsoldt has a knack of having his scenes land where you expect them to, but taking a circuitous route. When Wallace and Lipsky meet it’s like a nervous blind date. Later they become bros, joking about women on the road and chomping down junk food. They’ll never see eye-to-eye as writers (as Wallace had few equals) but they ultimately bond as men with ambition. To that end, The End of the Tour is a cautionary tale.

• Sundance film festival 2015
• First look review
• Sundance film festival
• David Foster Wallace
• Jesse Eisenberg
• Jason Segel

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the end of the tour.

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Directed by James Ponsoldt (" The Spectacular Now "), "The End of the Tour" might fit well on a double bill with " Amadeus ," another film about a genius and a lesser artist who basks in his aura. Of course, the setting is very different, and the stakes are much lower—"Tour" is a fictionalized account of the week-and-a-half that  Rolling Stone  writer David Lipsky spent following the late David Foster Wallace as he toured to promote his doorstop-sized masterpiece "Infinite Jest"—but it's still the story of a competent but unremarkable creative person observing brilliance up close, feeding on it, reveling in it and resenting it. 

It is also certainly one of cinema's finest explorations of an incredibly specific dynamic—that of the cultural giant and the reporter who fantasizes about one day being as great as his subject, and in the same field. What it definitely  isn't  is a biography of David Foster Wallace, much less a celebration of his work and worldview. Whether that proves a deal breaker, a bonus, or a non-factor for viewers will depend on what they want out of this movie. 

"The End of the Tour" is not really about Wallace ( Jason Segel ), although he's the other major character. It starts with Lipsky ( Jesse Eisenberg ) expressing amazement (but really jealousy) over a rave review of "Infinite Jest" in  New York  magazine, a moment that sparks his obsession with Wallace. It ultimately leaves us thinking about Lipsky's feelings and career trajectory, and whether he feels any guilt about using his brief association with Wallace to further his own career as a writer of books. At this point in his life, Lipsky has had just one volume published, a novel that few people bought and fewer read; after some hesitation, he foists it on Wallace while visiting him at the University of Illinois during a punishingly icy winter. 

The screenplay by Donald Margulies spends most of its time and energy observing a dance. One dancer is Lipsky. He only got  Rolling Stone  to pay for his rock-star style profile of a novelist by agreeing to ask Wallace about the rumors that he uses heroin, and his motivations for doing the story are, to put it mildly, less than noble. The other dancer is Wallace. His fiction and nonfiction were partly concerned with the meaning of the word "authenticity," and how the social rituals and technology and economic structure of modern life created false intimacies that Wallace was determined to reject. 

Theirs is a complex relationship, brief as it is. The most fascinating thing about it is how each side of it seems to be happening in a different storytelling genre. 

Wallace's side of the story is something along the lines of a light drama, perhaps even a romance, about somebody who's been burned over and over and has withdrawn from nearly all relationships save for a handful that he feels he can trust and believe in. Although the small part of the world that cares about writers' private lives thinks of Wallace as a bit of a recluse and perhaps a bit mysterious, it's immediately clear that he's just selective and self-protecting. It's the story of a man learning to trust again (in a love story, it would be "to love again") while worrying that he's going to get burned one more time. Lipsky isn't a Wallace-level intellect, he is very smart, and a good listener, and excellent at getting subjects to open up, even though his demeanor is presumptuous. He doesn't approach Wallace with the appropriate  humility. He instead comes at him from the point-of-view of a writer who believes that he is Wallace's potential equal—somebody as profound as Wallace but not as accomplished or famous, for now. Wallace seems to buy this. Why? Maybe because he's a teacher, and at least a few of his students have real talent, and he doesn't want his ego or insecurity to rule out the possibility that he might cross paths with an artist. Or maybe he's just a decent, optimistic guy.

Lipsky's side of the story often feels like the story of of a con man, or a regular person who uses other people without realizing that's what he's doing. If this were a romantic drama, Lipsky might be a drug user who swears he's gotten clean, or a recovering alcoholic who's not as far along in the process as he claims to be, or a serial cheater who wants everyone to think he's reformed and can be monogamous even though he's constitutionally incapable of that. We keep waiting for the other shoe to drop—for Wallace, who genuinely likes Lipsky even though he's observant enough to spot all the warning signs immediately, to realize that Lipsky cannot have a real friendship with him, and that in general it is a bad idea for a subject to think that he can have that kind of relationship with a reporter. 

Any journalist who's been profiling famous people for any length of time will recognize the dynamic depicted here by Ponsoldt, Eisenberg and Jason Segel, and the honest ones will be made uncomfortable by it. There is something vampiric about features like the one that Lipsky has been assigned to write. There are also elements of theatricality. As Wallace observes early on, the subject is expected to give a performance of sorts, imitating the person he'd like to be perceived as being. The reporter in turn playacts casual curiosity, and tries to push past the facade and find something real, maybe uncomfortable, best of all revelatory. 

Segel and Eisenberg, who as movie stars have been in Wallace's position many times, have an intuitive understanding of how this relationship works, and they illuminate it in the moment, with specificity and clarity. Segel doesn't really look or sound like Wallace (not that that matters; Anthony Hopkins didn't look or sound like Nixon in " Nixon " but was extraordinary) and I didn't necessarily buy him as somebody who could write like Wallace, but he's so smart and genuine and peculiar that we believe he is capable of Wallace's extreme sensitivity and delicate observations—a major accomplishment. Eisenberg is the true star of the movie—an actor of extraordinary originality and also bravery, insofar as he never seems to trouble himself with whether people will hate his characters. He's a great listener but also a rather scary one. His characters often seem to be scrutinizing other characters the way a snake might scrutinize a field mouse. There are many moments in "The End of the Tour" when we dislike Lipsky. There are a few moments where we might find him sickening. 

Is this a story that will fascinate an audience beyond editors, critics, reporters, novelists, and people who care about the problems of such people? I have no idea, though it seems unlikely; the film's incredible specificity would seem to mitigate against being discovered and championed by a wide audience, despite Segel and Eisenberg's presence in the cast. Did the film necessarily  need  to have David Foster Wallace as one of its two main characters? That's a thornier question. We rarely hear any of his prose read aloud (Lipsky reads a passage of "Jest" to his girlfriend, but that's about it) and there is nothing in the film besides some of Wallace's dialogue to indicate that the movie has any interest in illuminating Wallace's fiction, or the obsessions that he worked into them. 

It is very much an Amadeus and Salieri story, and if you are familiar with Amadeus, and the barest outlines of Wallace's life, and the fact that this is based on a nonfiction book by the writer David Lipsky, you know how the story must end: with Lipsky gaining a greater measure of fame via his brief association with Wallace and not being quite sure how to feel about it. The best thing you could say about "The End of the Tour" is that it could've been about any two creative people. That's also the worst thing you could say about it. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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The End of the Tour (2015)

Rated R for language including some sexual references

106 minutes

Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace

Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipsky

Anna Chlumsky as Sarah

Mamie Gummer

Joan Cusack as Patty

Ron Livingston as David Lipsky's Editor

Mickey Sumner as Betsy

• James Ponsoldt
• Donald Margulies

Director of Photography

Original music composer.

• Danny Elfman

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Jason Segel On Life-Changing ‘The End Of The Tour’: “I Was Alone With A Blank Page” – AwardsLine

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In taking on the role of David Foster Wallace for  The End Of The Tour , Jason Segel raised a lot of industry eyebrows.   With his hefty resume packed with comedic gems ( How I Met Your Mother, The Muppets, Forgetting Sarah Marshall), Segel wasn’t an obvious choice to play an author struggling with depression and disillusionment. Fortunately, director James Ponsoldt thought otherwise and Segel went on to earn a Spirit Award nomination and rave reviews. But what led him to this genre about-face? “I was on a TV show for a decade that was coming to an end,” Segel says, “and just personally in my life, I was thinking about other kinds of things. Then that script came along, and there was a line that said, ‘I had to face the reality of being 34 years old, alone in a room with a piece of paper.’ It really hit home to me that that’s exactly where I was at this moment in my life. I was alone with a blank page both literally and metaphorically in front of me that I had to decide how to fill.”

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The role has been transformative personally too. “It’s made especially poignant because we know David Foster Wallace didn’t make it,” Segel says, “and so you’re aware of the consequences of not getting ahold of your feelings. One of the things he talks about in a beautiful speech called This Is Water is the only thing that’s going to make you sleep alright at night is placing your value in being a part of something, and in being a good guy. So at the end of the movie, when they said, ‘That’s a wrap,’ I thought to myself, ‘Well, I’ve done everything that I possibly could, and that’s going to have to be enough.’ That was a very new thing for me, where I didn’t feel tied to the results of it all.”

Why were you initially drawn to comedy and how did that change?

When I was 17 getting started as an actor in high school, you sort of have the naivety of youth, and I thought I was capable of doing anything. One of the things about acting professionally is you sort of become defined, and you’re told what your value is, and you’re kind of encouraged to repeat what you’ve been successful doing. So I started to believe what I was being told, and I came to think that what I was good for was comedy. I was sitting watching Lincoln funny enough, and I had this thought in my mind that really scared me. I thought, the only way that I could ever play Lincoln was in a Saturday Night Live sketch. When that moment happened, something in me rebelled, and I thought, no, you did not used to think that way. When you were young, you thought you could do anything, and we need to change that. So, when the script came along, another thing happened where I realized, okay, this is your chance to find out not even for anybody else yet. I didn’t really feel a need to prove anything to anyone. I felt much more like I needed to break this box that I was putting myself in.

In the film, Foster Wallace accuses Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky of looking for a box to put him in–was that something that you personally enjoyed attacking? Have you felt the victim of that kind of journalism?

I think why the movie is dynamic and not just two guys saying smart things back and forth, is that it’s sort of a movie about a guy. I think for David Foster Wallace, when David Lipsky arrives, despite being hesitant and wary, he’s really excited to talk to somebody who might understand where he’s at at this moment. He’s having a very complicated, lonely moment–this moment where you get everything that you’ve dreamed of, and you realize you still feel the same. And you know, it’s a really scary moment, and I think he would love to discuss that with David Lipsky, but David Lipsky has already decided what the story is. So, you have David Lipsky, who has pre-decided what the story is about, and David Foster Wallace saying, “no, wait, there is something real and vital and human that I would be thrilled to talk to you about.” And it’s a non-starter. It really speaks to James Ponsoldt’s directing, and Donald Margulies’ writing, but that moment on the airplane, where they’ve been getting along, and then all of a sudden, David Lipsky, mid-conversation, brings up the mental hospital. It just feels like a betrayal. You know, it feels like he reached across the seat and punched him in the face.

You actually sound like Foster Wallace in the movie–how did you get the cadence of his voice so spot-on?

It was really important to me to get that right, because David Foster Wallace was also a professor, and there’s something about the way he communicates that was, I felt, character-wise really important to capture. There’s something musical about the way that he speaks. I also felt like it was really important to do that without getting anywhere close to impression, because that was the pitfall–to look like I’m doing an impression. It was trying to find the spirit of what he was doing with his rhythms, and then in listening to him, at some point I realized, this is a man who thinks in fully-formed arguments.  If you watch him answer a question, he presents a thesis and supporting points and a conclusion. I don’t know really how best to describe it, but there was just something musical about it, like a man who was conducting information. You see the way he uses his hands when he speaks, and I tried to do the same thing. There’s a sort of twirl he does with his fingers as he’s talking, and he’s sort of guiding you through his arguments.

Did you talk to his friends and family ahead of the shoot?

I did. I talked to people who knew him specifically during those four days. It was an interesting thing, trying to figure out how to approach this, and what I thought was, in terms of the David Foster Wallace I was playing in the movie, I should only really focus on what he would have known up until then, about what had happened up until that moment. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me tomorrow, and so, in playing that part, I didn’t feel like I should be too aware of what came after. I think it would’ve been, like, inauthentic to the performance. And so, I talked to people who knew him before that 4 days and then during that 4 days. So, it was really helpful, and people were very generous in talking to me about him, because they wanted him to be presented as a man, versus as somebody who is deified, someone who’s made something other than he was. I think part of what’s really important about people’s relationship to David Foster Wallace is that he felt like one of us.

What’s your next move? 

I’m writing right now, and then I’m trying to figure out what I want to make next year, which is a really exciting thing. You know, it was a big transition to, well, everyone keeps calling it a transition, I think that it’s a fair word to use, but to go into this kind of world. And so, I basically took time off to let End of Tour come out, to sort of do its job, and now I’m starting to look for more interesting material, stuff that scares me.

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Jason Segel Makes a Career U-Turn as David Foster Wallace in ‘The End of the Tour’

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By Cara Buckley

• July 22, 2015

For a while there it seemed that the coming David Foster Wallace movie was truly ill starred. Not only had it drawn the wrath of Wallace’s estate and his widow, but the casting of Jason Segel in the lead role — surely a stunt, Wallace’s fans said — had also unleashed howl after incredulous howl.

Wallace, who shot to literary fame for the voluminous 1996 novel “Infinite Jest” and hanged himself in 2008, was known for writing hyper-intricate fiction and nonfiction once described in The Times as “prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging.”

Mr. Segel, a Judd Apatow protégé, built a career out of deploying his hangdog countenance and aw-shucks manner to maximum comic effect — in the television series “Freaks and Geeks” and “How I Met Your Mother,” and films like “Sex Tape” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which he wrote, starred in and graced with multiple shots of his family jewels.

But late in 2013, Mr. Segel was sent the script for “ The End of the Tour ,” an adaptation of the journalist David Lipsky’s book recounting five days spent with Wallace during the promotion of “Infinite Jest.” Paging through the screenplay, Mr. Segel felt a rush of recognition. He was about to turn 34, the age Wallace had been at the time, and had also achieved success but was struggling with the question of what exactly to do next. That it was such a U-turn from Mr. Segel’s regular fare made the part only more tantalizing: Mr. Segel had grown weary of rote rom-com roles and was ravenous for change.

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘End of the Tour’

The director james ponsoldt discusses a sequence from his film “the end of the tour,” featuring jesse eisenberg and jason segel and opening july 31..

“I knew I was going to try it, immediately,” Mr. Segel said in an interview in the lounge of Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel. “When you start repeating yourself, it gets boring for everybody.”

Mr. Segel is as affable and endearing a presence as his on-screen characters suggest. He is also 6-foot-4 and, not wanting to seem intimidating, adopted the softhearted goofball act years ago, shrinking down, he said, “both metaphorically and physically.” Wallace was also a big guy, but playing him would be, for Mr. Segel, at long last a stretch. “I was terrified, of course,” Mr. Segel said.

After learning that Mr. Segel landed the part, many fans of Wallace were terrified themselves. “Jason Segel as DFW ... a young Monty Hall to play Kerouac?” asked one of the many hand-wringers online. The naysaying went nuclear after a photo emerged from the set last year. It showed an excruciatingly ill-at-ease Mr. Segel guised as Wallace circa the mid-’90s — in granny glasses and a bandanna — wearing an expression that seemed to say, “I shouldn’t be here at all.”

The reaction was swift, merciless and riven with schadenfreude. One dissenter tweeted that Mr. Segel was clearly playing Wallace “as some sort of stoned idiot savant .” “ Worst headband since Burt Lancaster in ‘Apache’?” asked a film critic at the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail.

Then, late in January, the film had its premiere at Sundance. Mr. Segel’s performance — empathetic, nuanced, whip smart — left the packed theater breathless. And Twitter ended up eating crow.

“Yes, Jason Segel is great as David Foster Wallace,” announced Vanity Fair. “All concerns were for naught,” said IndieWire. “It’s early, but let’s prep Jason Segel’s Oscar campaign just to be safe,” said The Huffington Post, echoing what Vulture posited the day before.

It was the reaction James Ponsoldt, who directed the film (opening on July 31), said he had anticipated ever since production began. “We all felt we had this secret treasure,” he said.

A devoted David Foster Wallace fan himself — he had excerpts from Wallace’s memorable commencement speech at Kenyon College, “This Is Water,” read at his wedding — Mr. Ponsoldt said he knew within minutes of meeting Mr. Segel that he was the one. He found the actor deeply thoughtful, he said, markedly different from his television persona. “He’s a really complicated guy, who’s only begun to reveal his real potential as an actor,” Mr. Ponsoldt said. “It’s like with Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, Bill Murray, Jamie Foxx. A lot of our favorite actors were put in a box before they destroyed that box.”

One faction that Mr. Segel and the filmmakers are unlikely to ever win over, though, is the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust, Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, and his closest editors. In April 2014, the trust issued a withering objection to the film, saying Wallace would never, if alive, have agreed to it. That the trust could not stop the film — certain privacy rights do not extend to the dead or to their estates — only heightened their ire.

The film’s warm reviews have not swayed them an inch. Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s longtime editor, wrote in an email that Wallace’s writing made clear his anguish about being a public figure and “his overwhelming anxiety about being on the wrong side of the screen.” Alex Kohner, the co-trustee and lawyer for the trust, said that when Wallace agreed to be interviewed by Mr. Lipsky, he did not consent to be portrayed in a film. Mr. Kohner also said he contacted the producers as soon as they learned about the film, but that the “objections fell on deaf ears.”

“In my opinion it is unlikely that the filmmakers could have legally capitalized on the unpublished interview and David’s good name if he were alive,” Mr. Kohner wrote by email. “Regardless of whether or not this film has entertainment value we question the ethics of their actions.”

Via a spokeswoman, the producers said they had been under the impression that “Wallace’s camp” knew Mr. Lipsky’s book was to be made into a film and that the producers had not known of the opposition until shortly before production began, when it was too late to turn back. “We are very proud of the film, and as deep admirers of his work, were always committed to honoring the memory of David Foster Wallace,” three of the five producers, David Kanter, James Dahl and Matt DeRoss, said in a statement.

Mr. Lipsky did not respond to repeated interview requests and, at the last minute, said through a representative that he was on a deadline and had no time to speak. Mr. Ponsoldt would not address the trust’s grievances, but a person close to him said he had not been aware of them until late in the process and felt terribly about them. Donald Margulies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who wrote the screenplay, said the objections made everyone involved feel badly. “We’ve approached this with such, we think, humanity,” he said.

The film was neither a hagiography nor a biopic, Mr. Margulies said, but a story told from Mr. Lipsky’s point of view, about time spent with a fellow writer who had rocked the cultural firmament and been anointed a genius, a label Wallace both wrestled with and deserved. Mr. Margulies conceived of the film as a “really smart road movie,” with the protagonist being Mr. Lipsky (played by Jesse Eisenberg).

The film originated in an assignment that Mr. Lipsky did for Rolling Stone, spending nearly a week with Wallace during the final leg of his triumphant book tour. Mr. Lipsky, as admiring of Wallace as he was envious, recorded, on cassettes, their winding, heady conversations in Wallace’s home, in diners, in cars and on planes. The piece was canned, but after Wallace’s death, Mr. Lipsky used the material for an award-winning article that ran in Rolling Stone and was the basis for his 2010 book, “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.”

To prepare for the role, Mr. Segel listened to Mr. Lipsky’s recordings exhaustively, watched clip after clip of Wallace online, formed a small book club with friends to go over the 1,079-page “Infinite Jest” in 100-page chunks, and rented a cabin by himself in the California boonies to read undistracted. He had bought the book in a store, and after plopping it down on the counter, he recalled, the saleswoman rolled her eyes. “She said: ‘ “Infinite Jest.” Every guy I’ve ever dated has an unread copy on his bookshelf,’ ” Mr. Segel recalled. “That experience alone made it worth it.”

Anticipating the storm of sniping after he was cast, Mr. Segel said he also largely stayed offline, save for the occasional visit to a techie site. “I had to immediately eliminate any voices that were telling me that ‘You’re incapable, you’re the wrong guy,’ ” he said. “Which is fairly easy to do if you don’t use the Internet.”

He left to begin production the day “How I Met Your Mother” wrapped, a shadow of Wallace-esque stubble on his face, something he still feels lingering regret about after having been clean-shaven for each of the show’s nine seasons.

To play Wallace, he said he worked to strip away any vanity or hint of pretense or self-satisfaction, and strived, moment by moment, to be as honest and empathetic as he could be. “Infinite Jest,” he said, ended up being the biggest influence on how he played the role.

“It felt like an S.O.S., saying, ‘Does anyone else feel this way?’ ” Mr. Segel said, “That there’s something about the American promise that x, y and z are going to satisfy this itch that you’re not enough, that a whole generation found to be a false promise. No achievement or pleasure or entertainment or consuming is going to be the thing that makes you feel like everything’s O.K. And it really hit home with me. Because you really are still you when you go back home at night. No matter what award you’ve gotten or how much money is in your bank account, you feel the same going to sleep.”

That said, Mr. Segel admitted to feeling pretty good that his performance and the film have drawn such praise: He was able to show himself and most everyone that his departure from comedy has real legs. He also said he was still exploring what do next, though early reports have him in a drama with Rooney Mara. While playing the role helped scratch his own itch for deeper, darker roles, it still left him hungering, he said, for infinitely more.

A picture caption last Sunday with an article about “The End of the Tour,” a movie about the novelist David Foster Wallace, misidentified his hometown. He was born in Ithaca, N.Y., and moved with his family six months later to Champaign, Ill. His hometown was not Bloomington, Ill. The article misstated the number of pages in his novel “Infinite Jest.” It is 1,079, not 1,029.

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The End of the Tour

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Jason Segel Reveals a Whole New Side in The End of the Tour

By John Powers

It’s a Hollywood truism that every great comedian secretly longs to do serious drama. In The End of the Tour, the 35-year-old comic actor Jason Segel delivers a bighearted performance as David Foster Wallace, the closest thing contemporary American literature has to a saint. “I wanted to do something that moved me,” he says.

The film re-creates a five-day 1996 interview the bandanna-topped writer did with Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg). Conversing in Wallace’s actual words (much of the script is taken verbatim from Lipsky’s transcripts), Segel conveys the quicksilver quality of the writer’s benevolent but uneasy genius. As the two drive around, talking pop culture and the perils of success, the real question ends up being who will control the story.

In person, over coffee in L.A.’s Koreatown, Segel is charmingly low-key. He’s cut way back on social media, moved near Santa Barbara (“I was ready to live off-campus,” he jokes), and after more than fifteen movies in as many years has decided to “get off the hamster wheel” and do only work he cares about.

He especially enjoyed reading Wallace’s 1,079-page magnum opus, Infinite Jest, with friends. “That’s not an easy book,” he says, then laughs. “Every Sunday it was four grown guys talking about loneliness.”

Sittings Editor: Mark Holmes Grooming: Jamie Taylor Photographed at The Line Hotel, Los Angeles Design: Gorman Studio

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The End of the Tour

David foster wallace is at the center of a movie of ideas that contains actual ideas..

Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg in The End of the Tour .

Photo courtesy A24/Modern Man Films

It would be impossible to disentangle all the threads of truth and fiction that weave together into James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour . Indeed, the movie is all about the blurry and ultimately unlocatable boundaries between reporting and storytelling, writing and living, being and pretending to be. Jason Segel plays David Foster Wallace—a man who, as Donald Margulies’ screenplay explores at length, was keenly and sometimes excruciatingly aware of how he seemed to the outside world. Much of Wallace’s writing, fiction or nonfiction, was an attempt to map that largely uncharted layer of consciousness in which one is simultaneously behaving in the world and evaluating one’s own behavior as a social performance. At his best on the page, Wallace was a kind of exceptionally truthful actor, inviting readers to the intimate one-man show taking place in the theater of his own brain—which makes the notion of him being played by an actual actor all the more conceptually disorienting.

Then there’s the close-but-never-quite-converging relationship between The End of the Tour ’s screenplay and Wallace’s real-life words (which, since he killed himself in 2008, have turned into precious commodities in a way he would have been peerless at satirizing). The source material for the script—from which Margulies draws many passages verbatim—is David Lipsky’s book about taking a road trip with Wallace from Bloomington, Illinois to St. Paul, Minnesota in the early spring of 1996. Infinite Jest , the 1,000-plus–page novel that got Wallace as close to being a household name as a writer of experimental fiction is likely to get, had been published a few weeks earlier to an avalanche of acclaim, and St. Paul would be Wallace’s last stop on a book tour that had left him enervated and wary of his sudden celebrity. * Lipsky, a reporter for Rolling Stone who had published one unsuccessful novel, went along with Wallace on the trip for the purpose of profiling him, but the profile was never published. Upon Wallace’s death 12 years later, Lipsky went back and listened again to the tapes of their time together. The book he wrote falls somewhere between a straight-up interview transcript (albeit of a highly unusual interview) and an annotated record of a real-life relationship—one which lasted only as long as that road trip, but which nonetheless drew its own complex pattern of seduction, intimacy, disappointment, and betrayal.

Lipsky appears in the book mainly as an amanuensis, and this is a movie in which Segel’s Wallace uses that very word to introduce his journalist sidekick, played by Jesse Eisenberg with just the right mix of fanboy idealization and writerly envy. Lipsky’s principal role in the book is to draw out his alternately talkative and reticent subject, sometimes by asking questions so skeletal in form that they scarcely make grammatical sense on the page. For the movie’s purposes, the character of Lipsky required considerable fleshing out—and that of Wallace required extensive pruning down from the prolix, free-associating presence in the book, a guy with insight to offer about everything from in-flight catalogues to the niceties of tipping in a Midwestern pizza parlor.

There are people—some of whom knew Wallace in life, others who simply feel they did from reading his work—who find the fact of Lipsky’s book’s very existence, not to mention a film adaptation of it, ghoulish and exploitative. Those people should definitely not see The End of the Tour , which, though I greatly enjoyed it and would watch it again, must be at some unavoidable level a betrayal of Wallace’s full complexity as a writer and human. What artist’s biopic—or, to take it a step further, what attempt of any kind to render an individual person’s complexity on a page, canvas, or screen—isn’t? Michael Pietsch, the editor of Infinite Jest and one of the main guardians of Wallace’s literary trust (along with the author’s widow, artist Karen Green) made clear to the Los Angeles Times his distaste for the entire project: “David would have howled the idea for it out of the room had it been suggested while he was living … the existence of a mythification of this brief passage of his life strikes me as an affront to him and to people who love his writing.” Wallace’s lawyer, speaking to the same reporter, put an even finer point on his objections: “We don’t care if the movie’s good or not good … People wouldn’t see this movie if it was just two guys driving around. They’re selling David’s good name. They’ve got Jason Segel putting a bandana on.”

Movie audiences, of course, aren’t made up of people with as close a relationship with Wallace’s work and legacy as his wife, his editor, and his lawyer. For plenty of people deciding whether or not to see The End of the Tour in coming weeks as it spreads to theaters across the country, its characters basically are “two guys driving around,” and the question of whether the movie is “good or not good,” whether it transcends its biographical specificity enough to be about something larger, makes a great deal of difference. To those potential viewers—who might be, like me, admirers of Wallace’s nonfiction who have not yet set out to conquer the steep rock face of prose that is Infinite Jest —I say give The End of the Tour a try. Ponsoldt’s gentle, talky road movie is a sort of Gen-X update of My Dinner With André : A movie of ideas that, far from being the pompous screed that category might imply, actually contains interesting ideas—and what’s more, allows its characters’ perspectives on those ideas to remain in productive tension with one another. (Remember André Gregory’s description of his nomadic, technology-eschewing lifestyle, followed by Wallace Shawn’s impassioned defense of his attachment to his cozy electric blanket?)

Wallace’s lawyer was completely right: The End of the Tour does star Jason Segel in a bandana. How you feel about that image is likely to determine how you feel about the movie—but maybe there’s no need to decide how you feel until you’ve seen it? For me, Segel seems the best casting choice imaginable for the part—if someone’s going to don that famous do-rag, I can’t think who’d wear it better. Like Wallace, Segel is a large man, a high-school jock with a hulking frame and regular-guy persona who nonetheless communicates a disarming level of candor and vulnerability. And like Wallace, Segel is also a professional writer, having scripted four of his own movies, co-authored a bestselling children’s book , and collaborated on other projects. So is Eisenberg—he’s had plays produced off-Broadway, and most recently, published humor columns in the New Yorker . Neither, of course, are of the same literary caliber as Wallace. (But if that’s your criterion, we should all give up.) Still, the fact of the actors’ real-life authorship lends their characters’ literary dick-measuring contests (which both Lipsky and Wallace can’t stop engaging in even as they mock themselves for it) an invigorating crackle.

Though much of it takes place in cars whose occupants are in a rush to get where they’re going, The End of the Tour is no Fast and Furious VIII. The main suspense on Lipsky and Wallace’s four-day road trip springs from whether or not one of the two will “get laid” (Wallace’s words) over the course of the St. Paul visit. Two young women–one (Mickey Summer) an old girlfriend of Wallace’s, the other (Mamie Gummer) a fan of his work who’s become a friend—pick up the guys at the reading and squire them around town. The foursome is apparently casual and platonic, but—especially during a cleverly staged scene in which we watch them all watching the John Travolta thriller Broken Arrow —meaningful glances abound, some of them expressing desire, some jealousy, some rage. In another mini-romantic intrigue, Lipsky calls his girlfriend back in New York (Anna Chlumsky). She’s in the midst of reading Infinite Jest , and Wallace hops on the phone to ask how she likes it—to Lipsky’s amusement, at least until his best girl and his ego ideal stay on the phone for half an hour, laughing at jokes he suspects may be about him.

James Ponsoldt’s specialty as a filmmaker has been the creation of believably intense dyads, relationships between two strong-willed individuals who both need and hurt one another. These have often been romantic pairings, like the alcoholic husband and wife played by Aaron Paul and Mary Elizabeth Winstead in his too-little-seen second movie, Smashed , or the troubled teenage lovers in his equally assured popular breakthrough The Spectacular Now . (In Ponsoldt’s first movie, Off the Black , the central dyad consisted of a high-school baseball player and a hard-drinking umpire played by Nick Nolte.) The End of the Tour ’s greatest strength comes in the attention Ponsoldt pays to the prickly relationship between these two battling Davids: the journalist trying to talk his way into the writer’s confidence, while the writer tries to use his linguistic gifts to hide in plain sight. It’s a not-quite-buddy movie that, far from making a travesty of Wallace’s work, so respects the work that the process of writing itself remains all but completely off-screen.

In one late scene in Wallace’s house in Bloomington, Lipsky, left by himself for a moment while his host scrapes ice off the car, ventures into the author’s darkened study. He’s been a shameless snoop everywhere else in the place: scribbled down the contents of the medicine cabinet, inquired about the meaning of the Alanis Morissette poster on the kitchen wall. (The answer: Wallace finds Morissette hot .) But in the place where the actual writing happens, the sanctum santorum , the reporter is too abashed even to turn on the light. He glimpses, in the darkness, the outline of a computer on a desk, then leaves without writing or dictating a word. Like anyone who loves an author’s work, whether the creator is still around to speak about it or not, Lipsky has no idea what goes on in that darkened room, and he’s not sure it’s possible—or desirable—to know.

*Correction, July 30, 2015: This article originally misstated that Infinite Jest was published a few months before the road trip depicted in the movie. It was published a few weeks before, in February 1996.

the end of the tour (2015)

The end of the tour.

tells the story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter (and novelist) David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace's groundbreaking epic novel, Infinite Jest. As the days go on, a tenuous yet intense relationship seems to develop between journalist and subject. The two men bob and weave around each other, sharing laughs and also possibly revealing hidden frailties - but it's never clear how truthful they are being with each other. Ironically, the interview was never published, and five days of audio tapes were packed away in Lipsky's closet. The two men did not meet again. The film is based on Lipsky's critically acclaimed memoir about this unforgettable encounter, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, written following Wallace's 2008 suicide. Both Segel and Eisenberg reveal great depths of emotion in their performances and the film is directed with humor and tenderness by Sundance vet James Ponsoldt from Pulitzer-Prize winner Donald Margulies' insightful and heartbreaking screenplay.

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Summary The End of the Tour tells the story of the five-day interview between Rolling Stone reporter (and novelist) David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) and acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), which took place right after the 1996 publication of Wallace’s groundbreaking epic novel, Infinite Jest. As the days go on, a tenuous yet int ... Read More

Directed By : James Ponsoldt

Written By : Donald Margulies, David Lipsky

The End of the Tour

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David foster wallace.

Jesse Eisenberg

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Anna Chlumsky

Mamie Gummer

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Becky Ann Baker

John arden mcclure, bookstore patron 1, jennifer rebecka holman, bookstore patron 2, britney mckiernan, bookstore patron 3, jackie bery, bookstore patron 4, alisha atallah, zachary parkhurst, preston smith, nathan daly, javon anderson, rammel chan.

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‘The End of the Tour’ Review: Jason Segel, Jesse Eisenberg Turn Dialogue into Riveting Cinema

“Infinite Jest” author David Foster Wallace meets Rolling Stone interviewer David Lipsky in film exploring the push and pull between subject and journalist

What’s particularly disappointing about some of the latter-day Woody Allen comedies is the filmmaker’s recent inability to capture effectively how smart people talk to each other. In his earlier classics, Allen had a gift for human-sounding dialogue even between the most pompous and pretentious of academics, but in movies like “Irrational Man,” his characters sound like they’re spewing computer-generated sentences that happen to include occasional references to Schopenhauer.

Listening to two smart guys talk to each other is among the principal pleasures of “The End of the Tour,” based on writer and journalist David Lipsky’s multiple-day interview with author David Foster Wallace, as the latter was finishing up the promotion for his novel “Infinite Jest.” That book was an unlikely best-seller, weighing in at over three pounds and containing a vast array of footnotes and minutiae regarding the rules of tennis.

(Confession: I purchased and started, but never finished, “Infinite Jest.” I feel confident saying that others probably did the same.)

The film opens in 2008 with Lipsky (played here by Jesse Eisenberg) getting a phone call informing him that Wallace (Jason Segel) has committed suicide. Lipsky is prompted to dig out a shoebox containing tapes of the interview the two had conducted a dozen years before. We then leap back to 1996, where novelist Lipsky has just published his autobiographical novel “The Art Fair.” (In real life, that book made Time magazine’s list of the best books of the year, but the movie — adapted from Lipsky’s memoir by playwright Donald Margulies — presents it as landing without a ripple, with only a handful of semi-interested fans showing up for a reading.)

Hired as a journalist by Rolling Stone, Lipsky pitches his editor (Ron Livingston) the idea of interviewing Wallace, whose new novel is getting rapturous reviews and equally impressive sales numbers. Tape recorder in hand, Lipsky sets off for snowy Bloomington to meet Wallace and join him on a trip to Minneapolis to promote “Infinite Jest.”

These concerns might seem merely intellectual, but Segel and Eisenberg make them palpably human and moving. Yes, they discuss the life of the mind, but they also talk about “Die Hard” and Alanis Morissette. (Heck, they even go see “Broken Arrow” together, at the Mall of America, no less.) In a massive departure from his previous work, Segel embodies Wallace’s intellectual curiosity and dismay over his sudden fame without overplaying the author’s vulnerability. (This performance never stamps “Future Suicide” on itself.) Eisenberg, meanwhile, captures the awkward, anxious intimacy that can bloom between two people who might have become friends under other circumstances but have instead been placed in a position to be, at the very least, cordially adversarial.

Of all the various art forms, writing may be the most challenging to present on the screen; Roger Ebert used to talk about how biopics of authors were often reduced to a scene of clacking away frantically on a typewriter, followed by the moment where he enters a neighborhood bar and slams his manuscript down on a table. “End of the Tour” refrains from depicting the process of writing, but what it has to say about the act of creation, not to mention the act of talking about it to an interviewer, is rich and fascinating.

The movie also does a great job at being a period piece for a relatively recent period — apart from a few references to e-mail, this is still a pre-screen society, when computers and cell phones hadn’t yet consumed our lives. That analog sensibility is felt throughout, from Lipsky’s cassette tapes to the physical, tangible books that people are still carrying (or, in the case of “Infinite Jest,” lugging) in this era. Even the idea of a magazine journalist talking to a household-name author of literature feels like a throwback to a whole other world.

Like “My Dinner with Andre” or “Mindwalk,” “The End of the Tour” turns dialogue into riveting cinema. It’s captivating enough to make me want to try tackling “Infinite Jest” again, and that’s no small feat.

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Product Description

When Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network) joined acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel, Sex Tape) on his book tour, an epic five-day journey began. As the two men share laughs and reveal hidden frailties, they are forever bonded in this fascinating and ultimately heartbreaking story.

Product details

• Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ R (Restricted)
• Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.72 ounces
• Audio Description: ‏ : ‎ English
• Item model number ‏ : ‎ 35225430
• Director ‏ : ‎ James Ponsoldt
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ Multiple Formats, Color, Widescreen, Closed-captioned, NTSC
• Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 46 minutes
• Release date ‏ : ‎ November 3, 2015
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Jason Segel, Jesse Eisenberg
• Producers ‏ : ‎ Matt DeRoss, James Dahl, David Kanter, Mark Manuel, Ted O'Neal
• Studio ‏ : ‎ Lionsgate
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0153C71C4
• Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ USA
• Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
• #8,768 in Drama DVDs

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• Trivia This film is the direct sequel to the multi-award winning documentary, The Show Must Go On (2022)
• Connections Referenced in The Show Must Go on III: The Original Scene of the Crime (2026)
• June 9, 2024 (United States)
• Official Production Studio Site
• Montreal, Quebec, Canada (location)
• Durgana Sports & Entertainment
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RBC Heritage

Harbour Town Golf Links

Hilton Head Island, South Carolina • USA

Apr 18 - 21, 2024

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