Clean and Sober

Hangover Movie: Clean and Sober

Made in 1988 with a cast starring Michael Keaton, Kathy Baker and Morgan Freeman; Clean and Sober is your classic hangover movie with a bit of a twist. Unlike today’s hangover movies, Clean and Sober is about doing the harder stuff such as cocaine.

Michael Keaton plays a drunken cocaine addict, Daryl Poynter who just happens to be a successful real estate agent too. In this hangover movie Michael Keaton or Daryl Poynter wakes up from one of the more serious hangovers we have ever seen on film. When Daryl Poynter wakes up from his night of cocaine use and drinking he finds a woman dead in his bed from a coke overdose and that’s not all. Daryl Poynter also gets a call from his employers at the real estate agency who are telling him that huge sum of money is missing from one of his accounts. The details of the story are the woman was a young girl whose father is now looking for, putting up missing signs all over the city and accusing Michael Keaton’s character of being a murderer and the amount of money missing is an embezzled 100,000 dollars that Daryl Poynter used in the stock market and lost.

Needless to say, this hangover turns into a nightmare for Michael Keaton’s character. In order to avoid the law Daryl Poynter checks himself into a drug rehab to hide. He doesn’t really want to be there nor does he really want to be sober he just needs a place to escape the horrible consequences he woke up to.

And of course, enter, Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman plays the tough drug counselor at the drug rehab that Michael Keaton’s character has now checked himself into. Morgan Freeman’s character happens to be a recovering addict himself and knows all the tricks in the addict book that Michael Keaton’s character tries to pull throughout the movie. After working with Craig aka Morgan Freeman, Daryl Poynter starts to realize he may have accidentally ended up in the right place for someone like him and begins to find himself changing into someone who wants to be sober. Not only that but Daryl Poynter finds himself in a romance with an abused fellow addict, played by Kathy Baker which is classic of any kind of real drug and alcohol rehab. Not only has that but, Michael Keaton’s character found himself with a sponsor in AA who is more than understanding of his plight in actor M. Emmet Walsh.

The hangover movie: Clean and Sober is an intense, gritty drama about substance abuse that portrays realistically the horror, shame, fear and even hope and recovery that comes with having and recovering from an addiction. It also shows the irony of trying to run from your problems and then running into your solution. Clean and Sober does a good job of showing how an addict hits their bottom and finds help in treatment and then begins the journey into sobriety. This movie was acclaimed as one of the best cinematic treatments of substance abuse meaning they did a great job of portraying it in a realistic light.

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