Acute Misfortune

An unflinching portrait of talent and addiction, now an award-winning feature film.In 2008, the artist Adam Cullen invited journalist Erik Jensen to stay in his spare room and write his biography.What followed were four years of intense honesty and a relationship that became increasingly claustrophobic. At one point Cullen shot Jensen, in part to see how committed he was to the book. At another, he threw Jensen from a speeding motorbike. The book contract Cullen used to convince Jensen to stay with him never existed.Acute Misfortune is a riveting account of the life and death of one of Australias most celebrated artists, the man behind the Archibald Prize-winning portrait of David Wenham. Jensen follows Cullen through drug deals and periods of deep self-reflection, onwards into his court appearance for weapons possession and finally his death in 2012 at the age of forty-six.After much critical acclaim, Acute Misfortune was developed into a feature film, winning The Age Critics Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2018.The story is by turns tender and horrifying- a spare tale of art, sex, drugs and childhood, told at close quarters and without judgement. Erik Jensen is a Boswell or Vasari for our baffled, fractured, fucked-up times. Acute Misfortune is the most intimate, revealing, and original take on an artists life I know of. Sebastian SmeeErik Jensen gives us that ingenious place where biography is also art. Jennifer ClementThis is supposed to be about an artist, a wild man, his lifetime, and it is; but Jensen has written such a beautiful window that all art and life is shining through. Im supposed to be an artist but I cannot put this down. DBC Pierre