Thunder Road
Features

Thunder Road

Jim Cummings
USA 2018
90 min
V'18

Jim Cummings stars, directs and wrote the screenplay for this film, one of the year’s most stunning indie curios, which in its uncanny, offbeat energy comes closest to TONI ERDMANN. If THUNDER ROAD is hard to categorize, it’s also impossible to forget. Officer Jim Arnaud can’t do anything right and has felt worthless since childhood. His premonition that he’ll blurt out something stupid, or botch things up, comes true when, at his mother’s funeral, he tries to dance his mother’s favorite song, “Thunder Road,” by Bruce Springsteen. The ordeal is captured on a cell phone, and shortly rumors, bad faith, and family and work troubles all befall Jim, finding him at his most vulnerable. Cummings dexterously walks the line between melodrama and pastiche, with an exquisite sense of timing. His deadpan dialogues and acting make Jim hard to read, and poignantly convey the oddities of manhood: A decorated officer, Jim nevertheless feels that, sometimes, being manly is just too darn hard. His nine-year-old girl Crystal, who suffers from her own pained uncoolness, tests Jim’s overbearing love, as he slowly learns that sometimes even the damned get a lucky strike. (Ela Bittencourt)

In the presence of Zack Parker.

Credits
  • Jim Cummings - Jim Arnaud
  • Kendal Farr - Crystal
  • Nican Robinson - Nate Lewis
  • Jocelyn DeBoer - Rosalind Arnaud
  • Jim Cummings
  • Lowell A Meyer
  • Danny Madden
  • Brian Vanucci
  • Bon Iver
  • Charlie Textor
Benjamin Wiessner, Vanishing Angle, 10 east

Vanishing Angle

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