‘Reality Is Not Enough’ review: Entertaining portrait of Scottish writer Irvine Welsh covers familiar ground

Dir/scr: Paul Sng. UK. 2025. 87mins.

There is a lot of physical and mental reality packed into Reality Is Not Enough, Paul Sng’s creative, confessional exploration of the life and work of one-time literary bad boy Irvine Welsh – who now comes across, as he takes stock of life in his mid-60s, as one of the literary world’s decent chaps.

It is all interesting stuff, but a lot of it can be found elsewhere

Coming two years after Ian Jefferies’ documentary Choose Life, which also premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival, the film travels through a range of high and low-glam locations, is sprinkled with high-profile readings of the Trainspotting novel and more, and is structured around a consciousness-raising drugs experience submitted to by Welsh. While it is saved from being hagiography by its attentiveness to the author’s famously engaging, slightly embittered tone, there is little here to suggest a wider audience beyond Welsh’s existing fanbase.

The film is loosely chronological, at the same time following the writer of Marabou Stork Nightmares, Porno and many other scabrous pieces back and forth across the Atlantic as he visits various festivals and friends. From his humble beginnings in Leith, Welsh has made enormous wealth and, in his own words, has become one of those successful writers he used to hate – but he doesn’t care.

In Toronto, Welsh meets up with a ‘DMT facilitator’ and inhales dimethyltryptamine, a hallucinogenic that will allow him to safely expand his reality (hence the title). This is something Welsh believes all writers should do, and which he continues to explore energetically at an age when others are settling into complacency. In the film’s most surreal sequence, Welsh lies on the floor and does his drugs like a well-to-do Renton, wearing an eye mask as a strong but gentle American, who presumably charges a small fortune, urges him to touch layers of his onion. This experiment is what structures the film, and is signalled by woozy, floating psychedelic background visuals that quickly become overfamiliar.

Welsh pays a fleeting visit to Edinburgh (“I’ve always come back here, always will”) for touching memories of his parents and how his father set him off on a destructive downward spiral from which the writing of Trainspotting was his escape. A book festival brings more memories and some politics, as Welsh explores his famously ambivalent love/hate relationship with Scotland. Miami, meanwhile, sees him work out in a boxing gym (Welsh appears energetic and well throughout) while challenging the old dichotomy between art and sport; for Welsh, there isn’t one.

In London, he visits Hackney Museum, where we learn how the miners’ strike paved the way for the broken Britain of today: Sng has allowed a couple of these true but cliched observations to stand. And then, in the film’s most explicitly self-regarding sequence, Welsh travels to Los Angeles where he is amazed by the size of his literary manager Trevor Engelson’s apartment, and Engelson celebrates the brilliance of what is actually, for Welsh, a fairly low-grade metaphor of the writer as vampire. In later scenes we get to meet Welsh’s third wife Emma Currie, with the author winningly describing marriage to him as being a “tough shift”.

It is all interesting stuff but a lot of it can be found elsewhere, in interviews and articles about Welsh and, of course, in his own novels. Sng rightly allows the books to speak for themselves via a series of star readings from Ruth Negga, Maxine Peake, Liam Neeson, Nick Cave, Stephen Graham and others, each delivering thematically appropriate sections and reminding us of what all the fuss is about.

Unsurprisingly, the strongest thing about the film is its words – which is a good thing because so much of it consists of Welsh’s intimate, revealing voiceover. It is mostly thoughtful, true and quotable, the utterances of a man who has long lived in language. Some nostalgists might resent the material successes of their favourite punk writer so shamelessly embracing the trappings of fame, but what it in fact adds up to is an entertaining and thoughtful portrait of a man who, after everything, has chosen life.