Review: ‘Almost There’ a paint-by-numbers portrait of ‘outsider artist’ Peter Anton

In 2006, Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden, two young filmmakers from Chicago, met Peter Anton, an unsuccessful eightysomething artist who lived in the filthy basement of his parents’ dilapidated house in East Chicago, Ind. Intrigued by their new friend, they began filming him for the documentary that would become “Almost There.”

Rybicky and Wickenden also arranged for Anton to have a show at Intuit, a gallery in Chicago devoted to “outsider artists.” But when journalists started to write about the exhibit, they discovered the artist had been convicted decades earlier of distributing obscene material to children. Around the same time, the health department condemned Anton’s decaying home; the filmmakers and a few hearty friends helped him find new lodgings. The move required salvaging decades of hoarded junk and trapping his one surviving cat.

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Anton is not an endearing subject: He’s demanding, imperious, self-pitying and manipulative to a degree that would be difficult to accept in a major talent, let alone a wannabe whose work barely rises to the level of paint-by-numbers. Nor is this portrait of him particularly well crafted. “Almost There” rambles and stumbles along. Rybicky links his concern about Anton to worries about his own troubled brother in a series of very personal but irrelevant digressions.

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For the Record

Dec. 11, 9:52 a.m.: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that it was Wickenden’s brother who is in the film. It is Rybicky’s brother.

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The film is as lacking in polish and structure as its subject’s canvases, which makes it an appropriate tribute to a marginal figure whose dreams of art world and/or Hollywood stardom stubbornly remain “almost there.”

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“Almost There”

No MPAA rating.

Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

Playing: Arena Cinema, Hollywood.