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BY MIRIAM RINN
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
MOVIE REVIEW
A meditation on the humiliations inherent in growing older, “Roadie” features some wonderful performances and a powerfully evocative sense of place, all the stuff you want in a small, independent film.
Directed by Michael Cuesta, who co-wrote the script with his brother Gerald, “Roadie” is set in blue-collar Queens where the protagonist Jimmy Testagross returns after being dumped by Blue Oyster Cult, the band he’s been working with for 20 years as a roadie. Jimmy is middle-aged, overweight, and desperate. He has little education, no marketable skills, and no place to go when the band leaves him literally by the side of the road. Ron Eldard, who fans may recognize from “E.R.,” fully inhabits Jimmy, even gaining weight to play a guy who can’t quite believe that he’s not a kid anymore and that his future is behind him.
Jimmy shows up at his childhood home, where his widowed mother still lives, and almost scares her to death. She hasn’t seen him in 10 years, and it doesn’t seem that he calls that often either. Lois Smith, who plays Jimmy’s mother, hasn’t lost any of her luminosity. As a woman who is slipping into dementia but struggling mightily to hold on to her dignity, she’s amazing. She can’t quite grasp why Jimmy has come back, but she wants to welcome him and make him a sandwich. Of course, he doesn’t tell her that he’s been fired, just as he never told her exactly what he did on the road. He’s trying to hold on to his dignity too, just as we all are.
It’s impossible not to see “Roadie” against the backdrop of the American economy’s long diminution of men like Jimmy. The factories they once worked in are closed, their skills are under-appreciated, and smarter, softer men have outstripped them. Millions of men have arrived at middle-age with little hope for the future and bewildered at how this happened to them. The mood of sadness, regret, and disorientation that suffuses the movie seems the general tenor of our time.
When Jimmy goes out to the bar, he runs into Randy Stevens, a guy he knew in high school. Randy reminds him of his old nickname Jimmy Testicles, and it’s clear from the way Jimmy stiffens that he hated Randy then, and hates Randy now. It only gets worse when he learns that Randy has married Jimmy’s old girlfriend, Nikki.
As Randy, Bobby Cannavale gives one of his best performances--oily and mean, but with shadings of the frightened, insecure man within. Randy has inherited his father’s used-car lot, and he has the salesman’s fake friendliness. Insisting that Jimmy come and hear Nikki sing at a local place, they make plans to get together.
