Butler's Cinema Scene

Jim Cummings

“THUNDER ROAD” My rating: B

92 minutes | No MPAA rating

Huge chunks of “Thunder Road,” Jim Cummings’ triple-threat Sundance feature (he’s the writer, director and star) are so cringeworthy that it takes an act of will to keep watching.

Cummings portrays Jim Arnaud, a small-town policeman whose life is coming down around his ears.

In the first scene — filmed in one long take — Jim delivers a rambling eulogy at the funeral of his mother.

Jim — who has shown up in full uniform, as if this were a military service — slowly becomes emotionally unhinged despite his best efforts to play the rational adult. Pretty soon he’s engaged in a hair-raising stream-of-consciousness rant about his mom’s work (she was both a CPA and operator of a ballet school), his own struggles (dyslexia), his wife and daughter (the marriage is going south).

His mother’s favorite artist was Bruce Springsteen, he says, and Jim has brought a boom box so that he can lip sync to “Thunder Road” while performing a two-left-feet dance routine in front of the coffin. Blessedly, the boom box malfunctions; nevertheless, Jim attempts the dance  in silence before collapsing into a weepy, humiliated glob of quivering flesh.

It’s hard to watch (yet fascinating). But writer/director Cummings isn’t finished with us yet.  After the opening credits he replays the entire opening scene; we sit twice through Jim’s very public meltdown.

The rest of “Thunder Road” — a fiendishly ironic title since 1) it suggests some sort of action drama, which this isn’t, and 2) we never do hear the Springsteen recording (probably the music rights were too expensive for Cummings’ indie effort) — consists of scenes from our protagonist’s rapidly unravelling life.

Jim Cummings, Rican Robinson

His wife Rosalind (Jocelyn DeBoer)  has moved out with their daughter Crystal (an excellent Kendal Farr), who has been acting out at school, teaching crude sexual terminology to the other elementary students.

On the job Jim zigs and zags between being a strictly by-the-book officer (apparently he’s highly-decorated) and needy emotional wreck. He finds some comfort hanging with the family of his partner Nate (Nican Robinson), but even Nate’s kids realize this frequent visitor has a few loose emotional screws.

There’s not much plot here. At its core “Thunder Road” is a character study of an essentially decent man being undone by his own intellectual and emotional limitations.

Tonally the film hovers somewhere between black comedy and genuine compassion for Jim. At times he seems  like a self-deluded character from the “Reno 911!” TV series, yet his pain is too obviously real for easy laughs.

In its last act, just when it looks like Jim is circling the drain for the last time, an act of God turns his life upside down for the better. One may ask if writer/director Cummings isn’t cheating here, giving us the 21st century version of deus ex machine in order to turn around his protagonist’s troubled life.

But here’s the thing: It works.  By this time we’re so emotionally invested (unwillingly, perhaps) in Jim’s fate that we need a mental/emotional palate cleanser.

We take what we can get.

| Robert W. Butler