An impressive if narcissistic debut
Thunder Road 15 cert, 90 min
Jim Cummings
Jim Cummings, Kendal Farr, Nican Robinson, Jocelyn Deboer, Chelsea Edmundson, Macon Blair, Ammie Masterson
Calling cards don’t come more nattily embossed than the comedy-drama Thunder Road, a showcase for star, writer, director, editor and composer Jim Cummings. It begins with a long funeral oration, shot in one take, which develops a 12-minute viral short that Cummings made in 2016. In it, he played Jim Arnaud, a mustachioed small-town cop in meltdown who stands next to his mother’s coffin and yawls his way through the titular Springsteen song while the congregation looks on agog.
That song speaks poignantly to stuck American lives, but Cummings knows that a full rendition at the start of this feature-length version would lead it to peak too soon. So here, his daughter’s pink boombox refuses to work, and he does a mute dance routine to a nonexistent record instead: more humiliating, more awkward still.
It’s the first in a string of disasters for Arnaud, whose violent behaviour puts him in danger of losing his badge and his daughter (Kendal Farr); her
mother (Jocelyn Deboer) files divorce papers before grandma’s body is cold. Jim is on the verge of a breakdown, cracking up at the slightest prompt. An innocuous joke misfires in front of the custody judge; there’s some wobbly oversharing with his daughter’s homeroom teacher (Macon Blair).
One of the strengths here is Cummings’s dialogue, and its unusual rhythms: Arnaud mentions his “dyslexia” but also seems prone to ADHD mid-diatribe, making sudden sideways leaps that are believably unsignalled, even smooth. He’s a rounded mess of a character, whose open emotionalism gradually becomes moving: there’s surprising depth to the moment when he hugs his longsuffering buddy Nate (Nican Robinson).
The one-man format suits stand-up theatre, as it suited Cummings’s 2016 short and the Collegehumor videos he used to produce. But some of the other characters necessary for this larger study (the ex-wife in particular) come off like glorified props. Cummings can be parsimonious even with close-ups of other actors, and most scenes are plainly an opportunity for him to start another monologue.
Then again, the twists in Jim’s tale hinge on what we don’t know about others, so it makes sense that this portrait of a manic narcissist should be glued to him, and only him. He’s found strategies, then, to get away with the limited perspective, and Thunder Road navigates the pitfalls of the first-time indie well enough. In time – who knows? – he could have a Richardlinklater-ish career on his hands.