It might seem that
Thunder Road is a one man show and there is reason to it. Jim
Cummings serves as its director, writer and main star playing an
off-the-rails police officer Jimmy Arnaud in a down-a-rabbit-hole
narrative. The film takes its title from the Bruce Springsteen
song from the iconic album Born to Run which becomes a trigger
of events of some sorts and was also developed from an award-winning
short of the same name in which the titular song plays a key role.
It all starts at the
funeral of the protagonist’s mother in which Jimmy’s attempt to
give a eulogy goes terribly awkward, completely bashing the social
norm with a hint of something sinister about the guy far beyond the
usual process of grief. Jimmy gives a weird, meandering speech before
he tries to play his mother’s favourite song on his daughter’s
broken tape recorder. Instead, hi starts clapping his hands and
dancing with no sense of rhythm, leaving the crowd, including his
soon-to-be ex-wife Rosalind (Jocelyn DeBoer, very good) and
his “I-couldn’t-care-less” soon-to-be teen daughter Crystal
(Kendall Farr, perfect).
This is the point at
which the short gets developed into something above the level of
quirky tragi-comedy, and it actually goes pretty much down the same
path. Trouble rarely comes alone, so Jimmy is pretty much over his
head with the personal, family and work-related problems and for most
of them it is just his fault. He usually starts playing nice, but
soon enough he starts rambling and interfering when not supposed to,
loses his mind, over-reacts and goes beyond just making an ass of
himself. Even his partner and best friend Nate (an excellent Nican
Robinson) has enough of his behaviour.
Will that Coen
brothers-style dragging the character through the torture machine
stop and how it will play out, it is for Cummings to know and us to
see. Composed in several longer, uncomfortable sequences that mask
the classical three-act structure, the film relies too heavily in the
terms of the ending on a plot twist that does not feel that earned,
which makes it a bit too neat and convenient, moving the film from
the territory of a provoking, borderline crazy comedy more to the one
of a feel-good dramedy and from its role models like early Richard
Linklater towards the regular and often applied Sundance formula.
However, there is a
couple of reasons why Thunder Road works nevertheless. First,
it is Cummings’ acting that finds a fine balance rather than
pushing the character too far in the direction of parody and moronic
comedy along the lines of the things done by Jerry Lewis, Jim
Carey and Adam Sandler. The result is that we as the
audience still care about Jimmy and consider him a sort of our guy,
even though he is a total fuck-up.
The other reason is
a perfectly outline subtext never mentioned in words. That would be
an acronym, PTSD, implying the recent events in the American history
and the war adventures that simply refuse to cease to exist, crushing
the small and simple people involved. For that reason, Thunder
Road works also as a perceptive, observant expose on the state of
things in the United States on the level more profound than daily
politics.
