Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough 

A documentary film about the Scottish author Irvine Welsh most famous for his book Trainspotting, his work has been like a tour de force in disrupting the literary world, whose characters mostly deal with drug addiction and crime told with extreme prejudice and wit. Here he shares a retrospective look back at his life, career, politics, drug taking and continued search to find meaning to it all. In UK and Irish cinemas from 26^th September.

They say write what you know so this documentary delves into how exactly Irvine Welsh’s outlandish stories and characters came to be. The film begins with him giving his profound speech on the meaning of life. This wasn’t written for the documentary especially but some 30 years ago illustrating his prolonged questioning of life, which has been a driving force in his writing and is illustrated by similar prose read by actors including Maxine Peake, Liam Neeson, Stephen Graham, Nick Cave and Ruth Negga.

The director Paul Sng picks up his story in Canada for the opening night at the Toronto Book Festival where Irvine Welsh is giving a reading from his second novel Marabou Stalk Nightmares. Any doubts about the intensity of how his work should be interpreted are cast aside by his terrets like explosive performance that brings a stifled laughter, from a largely conservative looking audience, as he describes the inner thoughts of a drug comatose patient.

Reflecting on his life as an author over 30 years, worryingly he says “the older you get the less appealing intoxication becomes”, but any concerns over his creativity are abated as he sets off to try a DMT, ayahuasca type hallucinogenic trip, at a drug clinic in Canada. Offering psychedelic enhanced therapy, his online meeting with the CEO of the clinic does not start well, with the manager literally hanging up on him. As a man well versed in drug taking, Irvine Welsh’s disinterest in the corporate preamble and wanting to ‘take the drugs and get on with it’, was in complete contrast to the more controlled experience on offer. He was going to have to toe-the-line if he wanted to continue his exploratory ‘education’.

Laid out on the office floor he smokes the DMT pipe and the documentary then shifts to the dark interiors of a warehouse to further explore the intricacies of Irvine Welsh’s mind. Based near his home town of Muirhouse, in the north of Edinburgh, he walks and talks through some screen projections on the walls showing photos and film of his childhood and life’s work.

He starts with the major influences of his childhood and his parents growing up in Scotland, his early run-ins with the police and identifying the need to get out and explore. He has a fascination with death and dying too, which is not totally morbid, but is more motivational towards doing something with your life. It is a strong message of his that resonates with audiences despite the harrowing stories, and is iconised in the soundtrack to the film Trainspotting by Danny Boyle, in what he calls a balance between brutality and humour in the darkest moments.

We meet his wife and there is a funny interaction with him and his old school pals talking about playing football on the streets when she asks, “would you play on grass?” to which Irvine Welsh quickly retorts, “aye, sometimes on glue”. The tone switches as jokes about football as kids turn to appearing in court for minor misdemeanours and then the arrival of smack in the neighbourhood that Irvine Welsh puts into a unique juxtaposition of an equal horror between the white collar nine-to-five and doing heroin, which his writing became an escape from.

There is a strong undercurrent of political and social struggle in his work that emanates from his Scottish heritage and another significant place to him is Hackney, London where he moved to from Scotland. A place known he says for being an epicentre of counterculture and for attracting disaffected punks. He was taken in there by Debbie Donovan, who also happened to be a central figure during the miners’ strike, ensuring he didn’t just subsist on drugs and punk music but further politicised the young Irvine Welsh’s mind. After his later successes he then moves to the USA and Miami along with the interviews, where he continues to talk about his development as a writer, further dissecting his writing approach.

These all make for an interesting mix of people and places, past and present to tell his writers’ story. Thirteen novels, numerous screen plays, adaptions for TV, radio, film and theatre, and even stints as a DJ, Irvine Welsh has been good to his word on leading a full life and after his latest DMT trip fans will be interested to know what happens next…perhaps some actual trainspotting?