1. The draw [for "Big Bad Love"] is a solid performance by Arliss Howard.
2. Howard conjures the past via surrealist flourishes so overwrought you'd swear he just stepped out of a Buńuel retrospective.
3. Brown's saga, like many before his, makes for snappy prose but a stumblebum of a movie.
4. Arliss Howard's ambitious, moving, and adventurous directorial debut, Big Bad Love, meets so many of the challenges it poses for itself that one can forgive the film its flaws.
5. there's enough meat on the bones of Big Bad Love ... to keep it from being dismissable.
6. In the end, this is a story about a hard-to-know guy who loves his typewriter most of all. Everything else is just dust-jacket photography.
7. Though Howard demonstrates a great eye as a director, this Southern Gothic drama is sadly a tough sit, with an undeveloped narrative and enough flashbacks and heavy-handed metaphors to choke a horse -- or at least slow him down to a canter.
8. ... alternately charming and annoying.
9. [F]rom the performances and the cinematography to the outstanding soundtrack and unconventional narrative, the film is blazingly alive and admirable on many levels.
10. Far too clever by half, Howard's film is really a series of strung-together moments, with all the spaces in between filled with fantasies, daydreams, memories and one fantastic visual trope after another.

What is a brief summary of the following reviews?
A boozy depiction of a struggling writer, Big Bad Love is too messy and self-indulgent.