In every circle of friends, there is a dark cloud. Three of one's five close friends will be relatively sane, while one or two of them are seeded, and ready to storm. Falling to Earth, the pain swims around in the gathering waters outside, each person in the group poking at it with a pitchfork, until it ultimately expires, or breeds. But the guilt of surviving, while others perish, is a ghastly demon, dodging in and out of the corner of the eye; constantly shifting, changing
becoming transmogrified. These memory- ghosts serve false haven; they shelter; they revitalize; they lie. So in the mind's eye, those who were lost, are, and always will be, perfect. Regardless of what their faults were, or their inconsistencies; when people are stuck in time, they glow.
Such as it is for Trevor McCaffery (Briel DiCristafaro), a lone wolf in a pack of howling, post- adolescent, incompletes. His parents lay in cold graves, victims of a car wreck the gruesome details of which he witnessed while careening through a blood-soaked windshield. Now he is terrorized by the sound of his own heartbeat, and limps around seemingly with barely enough blood flow to make it around the body once. And while his friends try their best to reanimate him somehow, they are resigned to the fact that their best friend is a shell. Trevor has Howard-Hughes-ed himself into a jump-cut on one of his old home movies, surrounded by the fuzzy warmth of winter hats and comfortably worn friendships. Not even the attentions of a sexy, beautiful young co-worker (Missy Crider) can extract him from the glass-strewn back seat of his parent's car. In the dream, his father's winking, reassuring warmth and his mother's tender cooking- apron- gaze are as sweet as the cookies that she is most certainly preparing. How else can dead parents be imagined? For Trevor, it is in a montage of his father's stone-dead eyes. Within this hollow comes the added shock of the inevitable, wayward, tearing apart of boyhood bonds, which, under the circumstances, amounts to the final disintegration of his protective circle of "lies."
Like pain, great drama is often cloaked in a garment of steady humor. It's why when we tumble, we laugh. The lighthearted and funny camaraderie in this film is a spot-on example of those guileless post adolescent days, while being a reminder of why most of us walked around feeling like our insides were in the diametric center of a trash compactor.
Though it benefits from an interesting ensemble of young, unknown actors, (the best kind), the heart and soul of Along the Way bursts onto the screen in the character of Jocko, played with sound, fury, sincerity, and great charisma by the film's creator, writer and director Andrew Bowen. When Jocko's manic, hilarious, bravado occupies the scene, the magnetic quality of the film is greatly buoyed. Beyond the laughs, Jocko is a classic "crutch"; so useful and steady, but constructed of only the most brittle alloy. As long as the group is assembled, Jocko is king of the world, but take that away, and he is jelly; except when he can channel all that onto canvas (canvas the great liberator and depository of demons). One of the hardest things to do is direct a movie while you are busy being brilliant in it. But Bowen, here in his first feature, creates a mood which is raw and innocent, yet edgy and sublime.
All of Jocko's polar energy is balanced by the steady, sometimes brilliant performance by Michael Cade, as Warren, the group's resident, nerdy, under-confident, introvert. Warren has an appropriately subverted reservoir of pain inflicted by his callous father, which he, unlike Jocko, has learned to keep from flying in his face with his protective eyeglasses. So typical of life, the dysfunctional lead the dysfunctional. And it becomes up to Warren to keep Jocko from caving in on himself, alone, with no one to prop up. In spite of these deficiencies and in spite of the self-destructive machismo asserted by Christian, the group's rock-n-roll, drug-hazed, maverick, (played scarily well by John McLoughlin) Jocko's winsome charm is able to make constantly elastic the boyhood bonds which should have broken already. At a time in his life when Christian's identity is filled with addictions, Jocko is there to give him a "hit" of what once was and what should have been. This is the thing about one's twenties; everything is reinvention, obscured by indulgence. Not unlike those patchwork days, the action of Jocko, Warren, Christian, and Trevor's pseudo-adulthood must necessarily come to its merciful conclusion. Bowen keeps the petal to the metal in the third act, which culminates in a heart-pounding, edge-of your-seat, crescendo. There's no sense giving anything away, but it's appropriate to say that "Along the Way captures your heart, but it doesn't let you off the hook."
And that's the thing about Along the Way; you just have to see it. It is a gripping and powerful drama. Yet within its yarn, giving it its heartbeat, are four very real characters, living and breathing in a natural and unquestionably human way. Characters that keep you vested to the end. This movie has a halo around it, and like its characters, is bathed in a "circle of light". A light which protects it from being fraudulent, ordinary, and heartless. The thing is; when you leave this movie, this movie does not leave you.
Such as it is for Trevor McCaffery (Briel DiCristafaro), a lone wolf in a pack of howling, post- adolescent, incompletes. His parents lay in cold graves, victims of a car wreck the gruesome details of which he witnessed while careening through a blood-soaked windshield. Now he is terrorized by the sound of his own heartbeat, and limps around seemingly with barely enough blood flow to make it around the body once. And while his friends try their best to reanimate him somehow, they are resigned to the fact that their best friend is a shell. Trevor has Howard-Hughes-ed himself into a jump-cut on one of his old home movies, surrounded by the fuzzy warmth of winter hats and comfortably worn friendships. Not even the attentions of a sexy, beautiful young co-worker (Missy Crider) can extract him from the glass-strewn back seat of his parent's car. In the dream, his father's winking, reassuring warmth and his mother's tender cooking- apron- gaze are as sweet as the cookies that she is most certainly preparing. How else can dead parents be imagined? For Trevor, it is in a montage of his father's stone-dead eyes. Within this hollow comes the added shock of the inevitable, wayward, tearing apart of boyhood bonds, which, under the circumstances, amounts to the final disintegration of his protective circle of "lies."
Like pain, great drama is often cloaked in a garment of steady humor. It's why when we tumble, we laugh. The lighthearted and funny camaraderie in this film is a spot-on example of those guileless post adolescent days, while being a reminder of why most of us walked around feeling like our insides were in the diametric center of a trash compactor.
Though it benefits from an interesting ensemble of young, unknown actors, (the best kind), the heart and soul of Along the Way bursts onto the screen in the character of Jocko, played with sound, fury, sincerity, and great charisma by the film's creator, writer and director Andrew Bowen. When Jocko's manic, hilarious, bravado occupies the scene, the magnetic quality of the film is greatly buoyed. Beyond the laughs, Jocko is a classic "crutch"; so useful and steady, but constructed of only the most brittle alloy. As long as the group is assembled, Jocko is king of the world, but take that away, and he is jelly; except when he can channel all that onto canvas (canvas the great liberator and depository of demons). One of the hardest things to do is direct a movie while you are busy being brilliant in it. But Bowen, here in his first feature, creates a mood which is raw and innocent, yet edgy and sublime.
All of Jocko's polar energy is balanced by the steady, sometimes brilliant performance by Michael Cade, as Warren, the group's resident, nerdy, under-confident, introvert. Warren has an appropriately subverted reservoir of pain inflicted by his callous father, which he, unlike Jocko, has learned to keep from flying in his face with his protective eyeglasses. So typical of life, the dysfunctional lead the dysfunctional. And it becomes up to Warren to keep Jocko from caving in on himself, alone, with no one to prop up. In spite of these deficiencies and in spite of the self-destructive machismo asserted by Christian, the group's rock-n-roll, drug-hazed, maverick, (played scarily well by John McLoughlin) Jocko's winsome charm is able to make constantly elastic the boyhood bonds which should have broken already. At a time in his life when Christian's identity is filled with addictions, Jocko is there to give him a "hit" of what once was and what should have been. This is the thing about one's twenties; everything is reinvention, obscured by indulgence. Not unlike those patchwork days, the action of Jocko, Warren, Christian, and Trevor's pseudo-adulthood must necessarily come to its merciful conclusion. Bowen keeps the petal to the metal in the third act, which culminates in a heart-pounding, edge-of your-seat, crescendo. There's no sense giving anything away, but it's appropriate to say that "Along the Way captures your heart, but it doesn't let you off the hook."
And that's the thing about Along the Way; you just have to see it. It is a gripping and powerful drama. Yet within its yarn, giving it its heartbeat, are four very real characters, living and breathing in a natural and unquestionably human way. Characters that keep you vested to the end. This movie has a halo around it, and like its characters, is bathed in a "circle of light". A light which protects it from being fraudulent, ordinary, and heartless. The thing is; when you leave this movie, this movie does not leave you.