104 min | R | October 15, 2021 | Roadside Attractions
A drunk country singer wins a dice game in a dive bar and uses the cash to chase down the woman who got away. Justin Corsbie builds his debut from a Todd Snider song and fills it with character actors who deserve better. The song is three minutes long and the movie keeps going.
Jesse is a struggling musician who drifts through a single night in a faded American city. He plays a gig nobody attends, wins money he should not gamble, and decides to track down Carla, the woman he loved and lost to addiction and the street. Justin Corsbie builds the film from a Todd Snider song and stretches three verses into a feature-length wander through bars, motels, and back alleys. The film wants to be a neo-noir about regret and second chances. It mistakes mood for momentum and lets the night sprawl without ever finding its shape.
Michael Dorman plays Jesse with a weathered slouch and a voice that cracks in the right places. He sells the exhaustion of a man who has run out of road and keeps walking anyway. Sophia Bush plays Carla with a wariness that suggests the years between her and Jesse have cost her something he refuses to see. RZA plays Louis, the bartender and confessor, and gives the film its steadiest pulse in a handful of scenes. Dermot Mulroney plays Rollo with menace that the script summons and then forgets, and Eric Roberts turns up as Skip to remind everyone what economy looks like.
Corsbie directs from a script he wrote with Craig Ugoretz, and the camera loves neon reflections on wet pavement more than it loves telling a story. The cinematography drenches every interior in amber and red and turns the city into a smear of light. That look is the strongest thing the film commits to. The editing refuses to cut, and scenes that need a single beat get three. The music cues lean on the source material until the songs start narrating emotions the actors already conveyed.
This is a film that loves its own atmosphere too much to trust its audience. Every gesture lands twice. Every silence stretches past the point of meaning into the territory of stalling. The cast is good enough to suggest the tighter film hiding inside this one, the version that ends when the night does instead of circling the same emotional block until dawn. Corsbie has a feel for texture and faces. He does not yet have the discipline to know when a scene is over.