LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Jan is leftovers season, and not usually for those of us who are perplexing to dull a final of a holiday ham and a honeyed potato warn from a refrigerator. Barely reheated and creation a approach to a large shade (and video-on-demand) is "
Roadie
," an aspiring indie play that dishes out a stew of low-budget film tropes seasoned with Sundance cliches so deeply engrained we forgot we knew them.Written by executive
Michael Cuesta
("L.I.E.") and his hermit Gerald, "Roadie" has a stink of freshman-year imperative artistic essay all over it, from a cribs of Eugene O'Neill (put a characters in a room with ethanol and other unlawful substances so that ungainly truths will be told) and Arthur Miller (working-class schlubs don't get no respect) to an finale that's embarrassingly, clangingly metaphorical.
Ron Eldard
stars as Jimmy Testagross, who left Queens as a teen to go on unconstrained debate withBlue Oyster Cult
as a roadie. After 26 years, Jimmy gets canned for reasons never explained, and with nowhere else to go, he earnings to a residence where his aging mom (Lois Smith
) still lives.While Jimmy claims he can usually stay for a day or dual before rejoining a wire for a South American debate -- and he tells everybody he manages a wire and has created songs for them -- he's clearly during a finish of his rope. Not assisting matters is a possibility confront with Bobby (
Bobby Cannavale
), Jimmy's high-school nemesis, quite when it turns out that Bobby wound adult marrying Nikki (Jill Hennessy
).Jimmy clearly still carries a flame for Nikki, who is still nursing her possess low-pitched aspirations by personification monthly acoustic nights during a internal bar. So when Bobby and Nikki entice Jimmy to join them as they "party like stone stars" in a internal motel before one of her gigs, a drink flows and a lines of coke get cut and a ungainly confrontations begin.
All of that would have been excellent if there were a singular impression who felt like an tangible tellurian being. It doesn't matter that no one in a film is quite likable, though we should during smallest trust in their existence and caring in a smallest what happens to them.
Having been given so small to work with from a Cuestas' script, Eldard during smallest creates an bid to spike sum like Jimmy's drink tummy and his inventiveness during replacing guitar strings. (When Jimmy does this for Nikki, it feels like a one impulse in a film where he indeed knows what he's doing.) And Smith, for her part, takes this thankless, one-note purpose and does her best to fireman-carry it to relevance; she does get one of a film's best lines when she refers to Jimmy as "my son, a rock-star...butler."
Less means to make duck salad underneath these resources in Cannavale, whose waggish ancillary purpose in "Win Win" is one of a underrated turns of 2011; this outlines one of a misfortune performances from this gifted actor, saddled as he is with a barely-constructed purpose of an aging bully.
As for Hennessy, her character's abyss and talent has to be discussed by others, given we see changed small of possibly in her performance.
Movies like "Roadie" make we wish that Thomas Wolfe had written, "You could go home again, though greatfully don't, since it's not going to be really interesting." In this case, anyway.
(news.yahoo.com)
