Hammond's slow and difficult rise to fame is traced, but it's clear that his problems go beyond his career and celebrity status. A focal point of Robert Brill's sleek set is the carton spilling over with Hammond's psychiatric file. Hammond recaps the watersheds.
Dozens of doctors attempt to diagnose him. One says he's bipolar, another that he's unipolar, still another that he's suffering from multiple personality disorder. One therapist claims he has a really bad case of seasonal affective disorder. After he objects that this doesn't makes sense given his Florida background, she replies that his case is a kind of inverted version of the disease ā too much good weather...
Finally, while locked up in a psychiatric ward, he meets a doctor who believes that it's not Hammond's brain but what happened to him growing up in Melbourne, Fla., that's the problem. Dr. K., who has an old-school Freudian authority and formidable accent to match, ushers him back to his childhood trauma.
Hammond's father killed Nazis during World War II and was disappointed there weren't any around to bludgeon when the war ended, so he terrorized his family. Hammond's mother moodily played piano, attended church, passed down her gift for mimicry and, it slowly emerges, committed atrocities on her son.
[For more of this review, written by Charles NcNulty, go to http://www.latimes.com/enterta...20150210-column.html]
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