Adapting James Frey’s infamously fictionalized memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” the director Sam Taylor-Johnson niftily elides the book’s truthiness problem with an introductory quotation from Mark Twain.

“I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened,” it reads, before we see a physically wrecked James (vividly played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson , the director’s husband and screenwriting partner) slouched on a plane and headed to a Minnesota clinic. A substance abuser since childhood (crack and alcohol are his favorites), James is now 23 and one drink away from almost certain death.