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.
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