SELF-HARMING has at times featured in popular culture, occasionally to some point, but too often as just a facile piece of personality-sketching. I’m thinking right now of Secretary, the 2002 movie that first introduced the ever-affecting Maggie Gyllenhaal to most of us.

It’s a good and intriguingly unsettling movie – but not especially for its treatment of self-harming, which seems a fairly perfunctory element. As a youngster Gyllenhaal’s character develops a habit of cutting or burning her thighs, but filmically this functions largely as a prelude to examining more fully her relationship with her boss (James Spader) in which sado-masochism plays a part. By contrast, I’ve been struck much, much more powerfully by a brand-new documentary – “Cracked Up”, directed and produced by Michelle Esrick, and focusing eagle-eyed on self-harm.   

I have to disclose an interest here, since I collaborated in this film’s production at an early stage … but considerable time has elapsed since then, and I now come with completely fresh eyes – and remarkably impressed eyes – to the finished version of the film as it makes its public debut. (Its world premiere was held last night at the School of Visual Arts’ theater in New York’s Chelsea district, as a headlining part of this year’s DOC NYC festival).

This doc gets down to business quickly. It’s in large part a profile of a comic genius – Darrell Hammond. He’s mostly known for his extraordinarily long presence on Saturday Night Live, and his uncanny, hilarious inhabiting of flawed public figures like Bill Clinton (right, with Hammond) and Donald Trump. (Hammond’s ‘Trump’ pre-dates Alec Baldwin’s, and for many connoisseurs it remains better – sharper and less burlesqued.) The film opens with Hammond revisiting the SNL team backstage, and we soon learn that he’d been a self-cutter through most of his life – unbeknownst to his affectionate fellow cast-members.

We get to follow his whole disturbing personal story: a childhood characterized by horrific abuse – primarily at the vicious hands of his mother – and his responses to that unbearable experience.

ONE RESPONSE was to turn to humor, especially imitations (they helped to distract his mother). Another was to blot out his emotional pain with alcohol and drugs, including the crack cocaine that gives one meaning to the film’s title. Another, beginning when he was 19, was to cut his arms and conceal the cuts beneath long sleeves. The self-inflicted pain gave him some kind of control, in face of the pain inflicted by other hands on his powerless younger self – pain that was redoubling for him mentally in agonizing flash-backs.

Mercifully – though it took an unconscionably long time – Hammond was able in adulthood to find recovery from the mental ills that crippled him.

Watch the trailer:

Cracked Up – Official Trailer from David Tereshchuk on Vimeo.

To its great credit the film is more than an individual (and harrowing) case-history – it is suffused with the growing body of psychiatric and neurological knowledge about something that’s labeled in the mental health field with an innocuous-looking acronym: A.C.E.

The acronym abbreviates the somewhat euphemistic clinical phrase Adverse Childhood Experiences. And Esrick’s exposition – braiding together Hammond’s clear, self-aware personal testimony … doctors’ analysis … and skillfully evocative graphic imagery – indicates convincingly just how childhood trauma will affect the developing brain of a child, often resulting in all manner of debilitating conditions in later life, both mental and (perhaps surprisingly) physical too.

It’s heartening to report that director Esrick and subject Hammond took the film for a pre-release screening on Capitol Hill in September, supporting the work there – both bi-cameral and (a pleasing thought) actually bipartisan in these sour political times – to push through valuable new legislation, including the Recognizing Early Childhood Trauma Act, which was passed and signed into law on October 24th.

As well as charting a compelling journey through one extraordinary individual’s struggle with the consequences of a horribly cruel childhood, Cracked Up sits four-square in the noble tradition of vital public service through the medium of film. It’s a persuasive clarion-call to all involved with children’s development – be it social workers, health professionals, teachers or workers of all kinds in the community as a whole – to be on guard for the warning signs of trauma in a child’s life. Such acute attentiveness is critical, given the inevitable family secrecy that will cloak the inflicting of such trauma.

As Hammond himself observes about his silent childhood ordeal:

“The worst crime is not what happened. The worst crime is being expected not to tell.”

*** For showings of Cracked Up across the country visit www.crackedupmovie.com