Doing right by the book

When actor/writer Clark Gregg first read "Choke" more than seven years ago, he felt such an immediate connection to the material that he became determined to make it his directorial debut. Written by the cult novelist Chuck Palahniuk, the book had all the shock and subversion one might expect from the author of "Fight Club," but Gregg also connected to an underlying sweetness in the pages that caught him by surprise.

"It felt like something I'd been waiting for," Gregg said in a recent interview, "mixing an equivalent of an incredibly irreverent dirty joke with something that felt like a punk, black romantic comedy."

Gregg's cinematic adaptation of the novel, which hits theaters on Friday, covers a lot of ground, chronicling the life of the character Victor Mancini (played in the film with sleazy panache and unlikely charm by Sam Rockwell) as it explores just how low one can go before finding moral redemption.

In the throes of his own sex addiction, Victor prowls 12-step groups for easy picks-ups, while also scamming money on the side bilking people who save him when he fakes choking in restaurants. His mother (Anjelica Huston) is a former political radical who is losing herself to dementia. At the facility where she is being cared for, Victor meets a pretty young doctor (Kelly Macdonald) who convinces him that his mother believed him to be fathered from the DNA of Jesus and can prove it. The story also includes a friendly but dim stripper, a kindly chronic masturbator and a historical reenactment theme park.

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Dual roles

Gregg has one of those "I know that guy" faces from his career as an actor -- he's currently on the television show "The New Adventures of Old Christine," appeared briefly in this summer's "Iron Man" and has a small role in "Choke." He made his debut as a screenwriter with his work on the Robert Zemeckis thriller "What Lies Beneath," and since then, he has toggled between work as an actor as well as a writer, though none of his subsequent screenplays has been produced.

Gregg admits that he has been "in and out" of recovery programs himself through his life, and so Victor's quest to quell his inner demons was something that resonated in a personal way. Yet it was Gregg's reading of "Choke" as a romantic comedy that convinced Palahniuk that he had found the right guy to shoot his book.