At the beginning of Big Bad Love, actor Arliss Howard’s adaptation of Mississippi writer Larry Brown’s story "92 Days," Leon (Howard), a down-and-out unpublished Mississippi writer, appears to be having sex in a bathtub with a woman in a wedding dress. Turns out he’s having sex with himself — which is an apt metaphor for the creative imagination, and for this earnest, overwrought, fitfully brilliant attempt to capture that process.

Everything in Love is happening in Leon’s head, which is not always a coherent or inspiring place to be, and apart from his wild and sometimes predictable flights of fancy, his life consists of getting drunk, driving in a pick-up with his friend Monroe (Paul Le Mat), pinning rejection letters over his toilet, neglecting his wife, Marilyn (Howard’s wife, Debra Winger, in her first screen role since Forget Paris), and their children, and getting drunk. At its best when Howard, both actor and director, relaxes with the loose genius of language, the epiphanies of free association, and the melancholy pleasures of a bluesy soundtrack, and almost unbearable when it tries to get profound or melodramatic, Big Bad Love rambles between self-revelation and self-abuse.