I Am a Sex Addict 2005 United States, Caveh Zahedi.

I Am a Sex Addict is an uncommonly personal, personable film, as well as one of the screen's most agonizingly faithful portrayals of the travails of addiction. Ultimately, director Caveh Zahedi wanders too far afield, dissipating the film's potency. But that doesn't diminish its value as a prime example of the film essay, a form seen far too infrequently in American theaters.

The film is structured as a first-person account of Zahedi's struggles with sex addiction as related to his friend and cinematographer Greg Watkins in the moments prior to his third marriage, which serves as a bookend device. The remainder of the film is divided into three sections, each concerned with one of Zahedi's relationships that was ruined by his addiction.

From the beginning Zahedi considers his sex addiction, which takes the form of a prostitute fetish, a problem; first, because it's embarrassing ("I'd always considered myself a feminist," he says) and second, because it surfaces as an insurmountable difficulty in all of his relationships with women. Each of his attempts to solve this problem is reduced to a succinct, often humorous, phrase scrawled in chalk on a blackboard ("Get a better girlfriend" is one).

It's an interesting commentary on our culture's Do-It-Yourself, self-help attitude. He relentlessly pursues the psychological roots and implications of his problem, but as he delves deeper into the roots of his fixation his attempts to overcome it become ever more absurd and cause even bigger problems. Concluding at another point, for instance, that shame plays a large role in his fetish he proposes bringing his girlfriend along to watch.

He's put his finger here on another fundamental aspect of the psychology of addiction. The idea that identifying a problem is the first step towards solving it can lead to a single-minded search for a magic bullet solution that will solve everything in one fell swoop. But as the film shows, the compulsive personality that succumbs to addiction can also become fixated on the quest for its cure. One can become addicted even to addiction itself.