90 min | R | September 25, 2020 | Stage 6 Films
Stanley has worked the overnight shift at a fast-food joint in Michigan for decades. Now he is training his replacement, a young Black writer on probation, before he retires to Florida. The film wants to be about both men. It only ever belongs to one.
Stanley is a man who has done one thing for thirty-eight years. He cleans the fryers, mops the floors, and works the late shift at a burger restaurant in a dying Michigan town. The job is about to end because Stanley is retiring, and the restaurant assigns him to train Jevon, a young Black writer working off a court sentence. Andrew Cohn frames the setup as a story about two men who cannot see each other across a generational and racial divide. What the film is really about is the comfort of a small life and the things that comfort lets a man avoid noticing about himself.
Richard Jenkins plays Stanley as a study in cheerful blindness. He is kind in the way that costs him nothing and oblivious in the way that costs other people everything. Jenkins lets small resentments surface in throwaway lines and then buries them under a grin. Shane Paul McGhie plays Jevon with a guarded intelligence that keeps reading Stanley faster than Stanley reads himself. Da’Vine Joy Randolph plays Shazz, the shift manager, and gives the film its only character who seems to understand the whole situation at once.
Cohn comes to narrative film from documentaries, and he directs his own script with a flat, observational patience. He shoots the restaurant in cold fluorescent light that makes the late-night interiors feel like a holding cell. The camera lingers on the repetitive labor, the grease traps and the mop buckets, until the work itself becomes the film’s argument about a wasted life. The script gives Jenkins more interior texture than it gives McGhie, and the imbalance is the movie’s central flaw. Jevon exists to teach Stanley something, and the film never grants him an inner life of his own.
This is a portrait of a man who believes he is harmless and the slow accumulation of evidence that he is not. Cohn refuses to let Stanley off the hook and also refuses to fully indict him. The result is honest about the small cruelties of people who think of themselves as decent. The film reaches for a statement about race and labor in America and lands instead on a sharp, narrow character study that Jenkins makes worth watching.