Meta cinema, not just films about the behind-the-scenes of making movies, but films about the private lives of actors, can be really fun. And not just famous, successful actors (All About Eve, The Artist) or has-beens (Sunset Boulevard, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), but films about actors who are struggling, who are part of a circle where some are succeeding and some are not (Mulholland Drive, Hollywood Shuffle, Swingers, Barry, etc.). Into this last category falls The Send-Off, a film about a successful actor with less-successful friends who throws himself a goodbye party when he discovers he is terminally ill.

At the height of his party, Dan Richards (Zachary Ray Sherman), an Emmy Award-winning actor, announces he is moving back to Tallahassee to be with his parents as he has been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. So the party is actually a “going-away” party.  He then forbids his guests to be sad, as he wants the best night of his life with his best friends before he goes home to die. His ex, actress-turned-film-critic Alexis (Lena Drake) to whom he had been abusive, unable to handle the news, leaves the party with nerdish plus-one Clayton (Sean Harrison Jones) who came to the party with a friend – he works in a video store and is intimidated and awkward around Hollywood-types – and is sneaking out to pick up a guitar from some guy on Craigslist only to learn his girlfriend is cheating on him with said guy.

As the party goes on, behavior begins to get ugly. One of Dan’s friends notes that he was psychologically abusive to his girlfriend, and some of the women at the party then question why his male friends find that behavior acceptable. Dan behaves threateningly in his woodshop towards two friends who are not sufficiently impressed with his woodwork. He hallucinates a meeting with James Dean. His friends decide to read a script aloud, and his frenemy Archie (Ben York Jones) tells him he is not a good actor and the Emmy should have gone to someone else.

Once the subplot with Clayton’s guitar and girlfriend ends, they return to the party and Alexis goes to speak with Dan and he gives her the engagement ring he bought before she broke up with him. He attempts to sexually assault her, and she discovers he is not dying of cancer, but has done something terrible. As she tells the others, “He’s not dying, but his career is.” Things then get really ugly, albeit predictably so. We see the ending coming, but like the better tragedies are powerless to stop it and perhaps even look forward to it. The entire film is broken up by fragments of a television interview with Dan after he won his Emmy which seems offered as a counterpoint to his descent into self-pity, anger, and madness at the party.

Filmed during the pandemic with friends of writer/director John-Michael Powell in his own home, The Send-Off offers a tight narrative of a “good guy” who is revealed to not be very good at all.  The acting is competent, and the narrative holds the attention. The big dance number (no joke) that ends the film seems a bit out of place with all that has transpired, but one imagines Powell making a comment about the nature of Hollywood and friendships in the business.