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Officer Jim Arnaud is a good man. He struggles with relationships and anger issues, but he’s just trying to do right by those he cares about, especially his daughter Crystal. He’s dealing with grief—he recently lost his mom—and that’s a thing that can really rattle a person, changing the way they look at and deal with the world around them. Jim belittles his own intelligence on occasion—he’s the kind of guy who tries to turn his own shortcomings into a joke so as not to be ashamed of them—and he doesn’t really have the intellectual or emotional tools to deal with this chapter in his life, one in which he lost his mom and might lose his daughter. He breaks into tears more than once, and goes on rambling, kinda scary monologues. He’s a fascinating cinematic creation and a pronouncement of a major talent in Jim Cummings , the star, writer, and director of the SXSW Grand Jury winner, “Thunder Road.”

Cummings’ feature debut is an expansion of his award-winning short of the same name, and it opens with a slightly revised version of that short film. In an unbroken shot, we zoom in on Jim as he gives a heartfelt, rambling, unfocused eulogy at his mom’s funeral. The original ended with an interpretative dance to the Bruce Springsteen classic from which it gets its name. The feature probably couldn’t afford the rights (but finds a clever way to land even more effectively). Jim’s daughter Crystal ( Kendal Farr ) and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Rosalind ( Jocelyn DeBoer ) are at the funeral, and Cummings captures that deft balance of concern and pity when you watch someone have a public breakdown. Jim will have more than one.

The film that follows reflects Cummings’ background as a shorts director in that it’s very episodic, arguably containing a few variations on the original “Thunder Road” as Jim loses his cool in key moments, including a courtroom and the parking lot of his police department. But there’s a loose, amiable, likable energy that unites these moments, and Cummings’ work as a filmmaker in the connective tissue is arguably even better, such as a great late scene when a friend pulls him out of one of his deepest holes.

Most of all, Jim is unforgettable as a character. Cummings could have easily turned him into a caricature—it’s not hard to think of the Adam Sandler variation of a cop who cries a lot—but the filmmaker grounds him and makes his issues understandable and fully realized. Cummings is an Austin filmmaker, and the best parts of “Thunder Road” have that low-key, character-driven energy that defined the early films of one of the Kings of Austin, Richard Linklater . We come to root for Arnaud. We want him to get his daughter back, and get his shit together, and find happiness.

The final act of “Thunder Road” relies heavily on a twist that I’m not sure the film earns, writing off a key supporting character in a way that’s tonally jarring. Then again, that’s kind of what “Thunder Road” is about—those major moments that come completely out of nowhere and turn us into emotional messes at the most inopportune times. When Cummings finds the right balance of dramatic license and believable characterization, “Thunder Road” is exhilarating to watch. And, maybe more than any other debut that I’ve seen this year, I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Thunder Road (2018)

Jim Cummings as Officer Jim Arnaud

Kendal Farr as Crystal Arnaud

Nican Robinson as Officer Nate Lewis

Jocelyn DeBoer as Rosalind Arnaud

Macon Blair as Dustin Zahn

Bill Wise as The Captain

Jordan Ray Fox as Officer Doug

Chelsea Edmundson as Morgan Arnaud

• Jim Cummings

Cinematographer

• Lowell A. Meyer
• Brian Vannucci

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‘Thunder Road’ Review: A Cop, A Character Study, An Instant Classic

By David Fear

“My mom didn’t believe in any of this,” says the man in the police uniform, standing in front of the open casket. His name is Jim Arnaud. Even if he wasn’t in his work clothes, you’d sense he was a cop: the ramrod posture, the alpha-aggressive politeness, that mustache. His mother has just passed away and he’s listing off her accomplishments, thanking the friends and family who’ve shown up to her funeral. Then he mentions Mom’s lack of faith, gesturing around the church, and it’s the first sign that something is … odd. The eulogy starts to take some odd turns; an anecdote about her generosity turns into a tangent about dyslexia and being bit by a mentally ill kid. The camera keeps slowly creeping up closer to him as he goes on and on; it feels like the frame is caging him in. Forced smiles give way to rage grimaces, then sudden-cloudburst crying jags. He keeps fiddling with a tiny pink boombox. He is clearly not handling this well.

And then, as he’s sifting through pathologies, he namechecks the Bruce Springsteen track “Thunder Road.” Mom loved this song, he says. She used to croon it to him when he’d go to sleep. Now, in front of all these people, Jim is going to return the favor. He goes over to the boombox, except it won’t play. You worry that he’s just going to smash it to pieces with his bare hands. Instead, he begins to do an interpretive dance that he’s choreographed, sans music. Occasionally, he’ll offer comments (“It starts out, and there’s a harmonica …”) but mostly it’s him silently doing jazz fingers, swooping arms and Broadway chorus line moves. It ends with a weeping Jim hugging his preteen daughter in his arms before he finally sits down, glaring at his child, the mourners, the world.

This single shot, which opens Thunder Road, runs unbroken for almost 12 mins. (It also makes up the short film of the same name that earned kudos at Sundance in 2016 , though he actually sings the Springsteen song in that one — and it is glorious.) Words can’t adequately do it justice, though describing the sequence does help prepare you for the 80 or so minutes that follow: a character study that tempts you laugh and/or cringe, only to then invite you to step inside the mind of a man beset by anger issues, inarticulated pain and a penchant for meltdowns. It is funny. It’s also a raw nerve of a movie, uncomfortable and tender and beautifully empathetic to its a-hole protagonist. And it’s the product of one writer-director-actor who’s been making short films on the microindie fringes for close to a decade and with this, his second feature, makes you feel like you’ve stumbled across a singular voice. Or, to paraphrase another writer talking about his first encounter with the man behind the title’s tune: I have seen humanistic American filmmaking’s future, and its name is Jim Cummings.

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Yeah, we know, that old hyperbole again — but the movie that this 31-year-old has gifted us with is the sort to inspire those kinds of swooning hosannas. (Just ask the SXSW festival jury that awarded it the top prize earlier this year.) After that funeral scene, we follow Arnaud as he meets up with his partner Nate (Nican Robinson) and freaks out during a drunk-and-disorderly call; he’s not even supposed to be on duty, since a recent unhinged encounter with the chief did not, apparently, end well. His personal life is also a shambles, especially when it comes to sharing custody of his daughter, Crystal (Kendal Farr), with his ex-wife. You can see him desperately wanting to bond with her and failing, one more connection he just can’t seem to make. Every encounter, whether it’s with Crystal’s teacher (Macon Blair) or a judge or a teen hanging with some “real slickers” in a mall parking lot — he’s exactly the kind of police officer to use that sort of antiquated tough-guy term — tends to end badly. There are a lot of one-sided conversations, with our man overexplaining things and inadvertently spilling TMI tidbits while folks try to patiently make sure he does not blow his top.

On paper, Thunder Road sounds like a hard sell — so we’re supposed to sympathize with some God’s Lonely Man type with unresolved anger issues, much less a possibly violent one with a badge ? But Cummings lets you see how this fractured guy, someone who’s trying to untangle a legacy of wrong turns and emotional instability, is trying to achieve some sort of peace and clarity through all of his clouded, fucked-up feelings as well. He doesn’t downplay or sugarcoat Arnaud’s less-than-positive attributes, but he doesn’t want to turn him into a stock bad guy, either. You get the sense that this gentleman with the square jaw and the outta-left-field outbursts is trying to live up to some sort John Wayne ideal of masculinity (notice how he blurts out the cowboy’s name at weird moments) and can’t reconcile that notion with how broken he feels. Beneath the nervous chatter and public breakdowns is a human being — sad, pathetic, paternal, confused, caring and worthy of a second chance. Cummings plays him as such.

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And the movie is full of unpredictable zigs and zags, from a dinner at his partner’s house where Arnaud tells a breaking-and-entering story to a handslap game with his daughter that ends in a moment of unexpected, unbridled joy. (He also punctuates the scene with a sight gag that’s quietly brilliant.) Awkward moments sidle up to tearful ones, followed by comic bits of business that range from goofy to borderline gallows-humorous. Cummings has a real sense of timing in his filmmaking and performing, but he’s not a showboater, either. Even that virtuoso single-shot opening bit is less look-ma-no-cuts then letting audiences see the disintegration happen in real time. His flavor of indie cinema is neither gritty nor twee, simply low-key heartfelt.

It’s somehow slightly familiar and still feels like a discovery, in other words — and the same can be said about his movie. It’s a matter of opinion whether Thunder Road is one of the best films of 2018, a distinction best left for listmakers and marketers. (Cue “It, Me” copping to the former.) But I can say it’s one of my favorites, the sort of experience where you walk out of a theater 90 minutes later and feel like something inside you has shifted two klicks to the left. All the redemption it can offer is beneath the dirty hood of this flawed hero. And at its best, Cummings’ character study makes you feel like that’s all you really ever need out of a story. It’s that good.

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Thunder Road

A police officer faces a personal meltdown following a divorce and the death of his mother. A police officer faces a personal meltdown following a divorce and the death of his mother. A police officer faces a personal meltdown following a divorce and the death of his mother.

• Jim Cummings
• Kendal Farr
• Nican Robinson
• 136 User reviews
• 107 Critic reviews
• 79 Metascore
• 14 wins & 16 nominations

• Officer Jim Arnaud

• Crystal Arnaud

• Officer Nate Lewis

• Rosalind Arnaud

• Dustin Zahn

• Morgan Arnaud

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• The Captain

• Officer Doug

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Officer Jim Arnaud : Just because somebody leaves... just because somebody chooses to leave, that doesn't mean they didn't want to be here with you. It means they had a hard time with things. It's a lot for some people.

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Thunder Road Review

28 May 2019

Thunder Road

Thunder Road , loosely inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s paean

to smalltown struggles and dreams, is an odd fish. New Orleans native Jim Cummings, who wrote and directed it (as well as playing ukulele on the score), trades in uncomfortable comedy and dominates the screen as all-American moustachioed cop Jim Arnaud, both a wide-eyed innocent and a moderately frightening livewire: Ned Flanders with a gun. There is a story here, just about; it’s chiefly interested in Arnaud’s wavering mental state, Cummings all but providing a one-man show.

When we meet Officer Arnaud he’s already unstable, on the verge of cracking at a funeral. Thunder Road sprung from Cummings’ 2016 Sundance-winning short of the same name, featuring him as Arnaud delivering his mother’s eulogy in church, a 12-minute unbroken take of him struggling to hold it together while paying tribute, his mind cascading with grief, pain and regret, gruelling self-reflection spilling out indiscriminately. The feature’s opening almost exactly replicates the short, and from there Arnaud unravels further, forever at threat of being crushed by life’s various cruelties. Prone to increasingly volatile outbursts, he is both martyr and madman, a confused, wounded lamb. The film is essentially a 90-minute meltdown.

A tour de force turn from its creator.

Taking its cue from the Springsteen song, its landscape reflects a feeling of being hemmed in and a desire to break free, flirting with some societal themes: pressure, machismo, rage, with Arnaud’s anxiety and uncertainty mirroring what many of us are feeling right now. He’s a work in progress, a balancing act, as is the film itself, straddling the comedy/drama borders. It’s a bit of a reach, Cummings dropping what is clearly a comic character into a less comical world, in the hope that events will imbue him with pathos. As such, you’re often uncertain if you should be laughing with him, or at him, or even at all. Ultimately, though, it is all of the above, all at once — and somehow that’s fine.

All the eccentricity aside, the pathos breaks through, and it’s the little flickers of real emotion that make Thunder Road win you over. Cummings zeroes in on the little things, which are, of course, the big things: a confused, brittle Arnaud bonding with his self-assured daughter over a game of patty cake, culminating in Cummings very subtly signifying joy, is incredibly sweet. Thunder Road is a tour de force turn from its creator, who delivers an unpredictable performance we’ve never quite seen before. Sat in the cinema, too close for comfort, you can’t escape him, and, amazingly, you don’t really want to. It is cringingly, rewardingly intimate.

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‘thunder road’: film review | sxsw 2018.

Jim Cummings builds a feature, 'Thunder Road,' out of his attention-grabbing 2016 short of the same name.

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When it played the festival circuit in 2016 (winning Jury prizes at Sundance and practically everywhere else), Jim Cummings’ 13-minute short Thunder Road was hard to forget — a deeply strange, yet funny, knot of grief and apology built around a heartbreakingly awkward dance-and-lip-sync performance of Bruce Springsteen’s song. Conceived as one continuous shot among mourners at a funeral, it was perfectly complete despite raising many questions about the lives lived outside that room — especially the life of the policeman (Cummings) delivering that lip-sync tribute to his dead mother.

Back now with a weird and moving feature adaptation, Cummings follows that cop out into the rest of his life, where this is not the only kind of loss he’s trying, unsuccessfully, to cope with. Driven by Cummings’ transfixingly vulnerable performance, the movie not only justifies returning to the source: Shockingly, it does so without even using the device that seemed key to the short’s success.

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As in the short, we meet Cummings’ Officer Jim Arnaud as he prepares to address mourners at his mother’s funeral. He’s holding a child’s pink jambox , hoping to play a song she loved after saying a few words. But things aren’t going smoothly, and when he can’t get the song to play, he mimes the dance he has prepared while seeming to hear the tune in his head. He’s even more adrift than he was in the earlier film (where the song did play), but his sudden recoveries amid the humiliation — “ anyhoo ,” he singsongs, getting back on track after his quasi-eulogy breaks down into weeping — evince a peculiar kind of emotional strength. Our nervous laughter bubbles up as a kind of encouragement to him, much like the whispered reassurances coming from offscreen.

Jim goes right back to work after the funeral, heading out with partner Nate Lewis ( Nican Robinson) on patrol, where he has to deal with civilians even more emotionally distressed than he is. His chief had told him to take the week off, and when the situation comes to a head, Jim is frantic not to lose face with his fellow officers by being sent home. He tries to leave on his own terms; no one is convinced.

We watch Jim’s diligent efforts to resolve the loose ends of his mother’s life — his two siblings, who stayed away from the funeral, do nothing to help — while dealing with his estranged wife Roz (Jocelyn DeBoer ). Roz’s bitchiness under these circumstances is a bit tough to believe, though later revelations will make it more plausible; she’s mostly important here as an obstacle between Jim and Crystal (Kendal Farr), the daughter he loves deeply. Whatever his mother’s unexplained faults, Jim grew up prepared to nurture his kid: If having a teacher tell him she may have a reading disability is enough to send him into a cold-sweat panic, imagine what a custody battle will do. In a family-court scene, Cummings locates the precise notes of nervous energy that might make a man of clear goodwill seem risky to a judge.

Back at the police station, Cummings deftly stages a real jolt, suggesting that Jim, in his current state, may not in fact be up to his responsibilities. Robinson is sensitive as the partner who’s ready to forgive. But friendship is only going to help Jim so much, and he’s compelled to go talk to his sister Morgan (Chelsea Edmundson ). In a single scene between the two, the film hints at reasons for rifts in this family while leaving us sure that, capable or not, Jim is going to have to make sense of it all on his own.

The movie has one more gut-punch in store for Jim, pushing him toward an abrupt identification with the speaker in the Springsteen song that haunts him. Abandoned by those who should care, desperate to escape, he begs an apprehensive girl to believe in him just enough to let him drive them toward something better.

Production company: 10 East Cast: Jim Cummings, Kendal Farr, Nican Robinson, Jocelyn DeBoer , Macon Blair, Bill Wise, Jordan Fox, Chelsea Edmundson Director-screenwriter: Jim Cummings Producers: Zack Parker, Natalie Metzger, Ben Wiessner Executive producers: Matt Miller, William Pisciotta, Zack Parker, John Cummings Director of photography: Lowell A. Meyer Production designer: Charlie Textor Costume designer: Michaela Beach Editor: Brian Vannucci Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Narrative Feature Competition)

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'Thunder Road' Review: An Off-Kilter Look at Love and Loss

An impressive 12-minute long one-take sets the scene in writer/director/actor Jim Cummings’ dark comedy, Thunder Road .

Aside from the impressive technical accomplishment of capturing this mammoth of a monologue, which is performed by Cummings alone, it’s clear from the beginning that this is going to be a very off-kilter viewing experience. Emotionally in tune with the struggles of being both a parent and a child, Cummings creates a bittersweet love letter that speaks to the complexities of family dynamics while keeping the overall tone of the film interesting and unconventional.

Thunder Road is Jim Cummings’ movie, through and through. He plays the fragile protagonist, police officer Jim Arnaud, and when we first meet him, he is delivering a heartfelt tribute to his deceased mother at her funeral. Dressed in his uniform, Jim uses his platform for a cathartic release of his pent-up regret about his past behavior of acting out towards his mother during childhood. He ultimately eulogizes her with an interpretive dance to Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”, providing a much-needed chuckle after nearly 10-minutes of grief-stricken sobbing.

As if losing his mother wasn’t enough, Jim is also in the midst of a divorce, having issues at work, and struggling to connect with his young daughter, Crystal (Kendal Farr). After all, there is only so much advice a father can give his pre-teen daughter about boys and wearing makeup. Jim’s unrelenting heartbreak is heavy, it seems as if he is never happy and that is a tough thing to sit through for an hour and a half. But Jim is resilient in his quest to give and receive love, which offers a silver lining during his struggle.

Directorial choices like these are what make ‘ Thunder Road’  inventive both in front of and behind the lens.

A limited musical score adds to this dark comedy’s overall feeling of unrest. When there is music, it comes from one lone, depressing violin, except for the beautiful sound of Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love” performed by a string quartet in the film’s final scene. That moment is sure to give anyone chills. This non-use of music is quite unconventional, and some may view it as flat. While there are moments that could have been aided by a more consistent score, the silence further adds focus to Cummings performance as an actor- distraction free.

Directorial choices like these are what make Thunder Road  inventive both in front of and behind the lens. Cinematographer Lowell A. Meyer is patient with the long-takes and smooth with the subtle movements, breathing life into every scene.

Based off of and built upon Cummings’ short film of the same name, which won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at the 2016 Sundance Film festival, the 12-minute long short was quickly adapted into the feature-length film that is playing in theaters today. Thunder Road was also honored with the SXSW 2018 Feature Film Grand Jury Award and was in the top five best-reviewed films at Cannes this year where it premiered internationally.

‘Thunder Road’ is not rated. 92 minutes. Now playing at Laemmle theaters in Glendale, Pasadena, and Santa Monica and available on VOD. 

Morgan Rojas

Certified fresh. For disclosure purposes, Morgan currently runs PR at PRETTYBIRD and Ventureland.

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Thunder Road

Review by brian eggert may 7, 2022.

At some point in Thunder Road , you stop laughing at Jim Arnaud, an openhearted police officer behind a corny mustache, and you see his absurd and self-destructive behavior as that of a wounded human being worthy of your empathy. The distinction will come at different moments for every viewer, I suspect. For some, it might not be until the last scene, where Jim sees a glimmer of his late mother in his daughter’s response to ballet. Or maybe it’s the scene where, after visiting his preoccupied sister, Jim leaves his late mother’s earrings on the porch in a travel cup. Then again, the first scene might do the trick. The film opens with Jim at his mother’s funeral, giving a bizarre eulogy, as though the first four stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression—struck him simultaneously and caused an emotional overload. Then, trying to load the titular Bruce Springsteen song on a child’s CD player, Jim decides to proceed without music and performs a dance routine he choreographed in honor of his late mother, a former dance instructor. It’s a cringy, funny, and painful scene that finds a man so ruined by the loss that he’s filled with unguarded vulnerability, rage, and regret—all through his awkward energy.

Writer-director Jim Cummings shoots the funeral scene almost in a single long shot, lingering on Jim’s meltdown for an excruciating amount of time. There’s no looking away from this embarrassing scene, no matter how badly we might want to avert our eyes. A version of the scene appeared in Cummings’ original 12-minute short from 2016, which featured the Springsteen song and won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Unfortunately, when he expanded the short into a feature, rights issues prevented him from using the song. Even so, the film debuted at South by Southwest, and Cummings earned more awards. Made for a mere $250,000 in Austin, Texas, the production famously became a success after Cummings used paid social marketing campaigns and targeted smaller film festivals to ensure a profit. He avoided the usual, costly methods of advertising, such as television or even theatrical ads, and altogether circumvented traditional promotional models. Ever since, Cummings has been working on the margins of Hollywood, making underseen microbudget movies like the great horror-comedy The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020) and this year’s strange thriller The Beta Test (2021). 

Even more today than its initial release, Thunder Road rests on an unlikely conceit for contemporary audiences. More often than not, an unstable white male cop with rage issues occupies the villain role, both in American culture and the movies. Here, Cummings manages to place an on-the-brink cop at the center of his film without making his story about the fallibility of police officers. In another movie, this character might be responsible for some awful act of negligence or victimization. Instead, Cummings sees Jim’s series of personal failures and defeats with consideration and tenderness, even in moments when his erratic behavior proves hilariously out of whack. Facing a divorce and battling for custody of his preadolescent daughter, Crystal (Kendal Farr), Jim reels from his broken marriage, dead mother, absent father, and thin sibling relationships. His world has fallen apart all around him, and he’s not handling it well. Jim’s friend and colleague Nate (Nican Robinson) represents the only constant in his life—someone who has the well-adjusted family that Jim has always wanted but never had. 

Cummings’ portrait of his character’s complex masculine identity doesn’t overstate itself; it reveals Jim layer by layer through the 93-minute runtime, often in subtle ways disguised by his comically bad behavior. But through his freak-outs, Jim tries to live up to a masculine ideal—a need that finds him reminding others that he’s a “grown man,” or proudly wearing his uniform to every occasion from funerals to parent-teacher conferences (“See me wrestling an alligator, help the alligator,” he repeats). It’s telling, then, that Cummings shows Jim’s most apparent personal failures with and desire to understand the women in his life: his regrets about everything he didn’t say to his mother; his inability to bond with his daughter; his downright antagonistic relationship with his soon-to-be ex-wife, who he not-so-subtly wishes would get hit by a train. Following so-called traditional family values, Jim doubtless wanted guidance from his father, and in his absence, rejected his mother—a choice, now that she’s dead, he regrets. By the film’s end, he realizes that his mother couldn’t admit her faults to anyone. If he’s to avoid repeating her mistakes and ending up in the grave by apparent suicide (a detail revealed in understated dialogue), he has to break the pattern. Jim starts out experiencing the first four stages of grief all at once, but he ends the film with the final stage, acceptance. 

Despite the often hilarious and touching character study at work, the film rests on Jim Cummings. In a sense, it’s a one-man show. Cummings even plays ukulele on the soundtrack (replacing Springsteen’s song about small-town despair and big-city dreams, which might have helped clarify some of the film’s themes for those unfamiliar with the full lyrics). Using modest equipment and mostly unknown actors, Cummings manages a heartfelt and extraordinarily acted first feature, among the most assured and tonally unpredictable, yet confidently made, of the 2010s. Both in front and behind the camera, he’s doing incredible work as a writer, director, composer, editor, producer, and marketer. Most of all, there’s a magnetic performance at the center of Thunder Road that begins like Jim Carrey and ends like John Cassavetes. And though Jim approaches downright destructive and, in one scene involving a gun, dangerous behavior, he never loses the audience’s sympathy. It’s hard to watch someone go through all this, but the humor and intimacy reward us with laughter and tears. 

(Note:  This review was originally suggested and posted to Patreon on November 11, 2021. )

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Film Reviews

Thunder Road

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Director: Jim Cummings

Cast: Jim Cummings, Kendal Farr, Nican Robinson, Jocelyn DeBoer, Chelsea Edmundson

MPAA-Rating:

Release Date: October 12th, 2018

In 2016, director Jim Cummings’ Thunder Road  won the short film grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival. That film, which focused on one man’s eulogy of his mother, was the beginning of something great and now Cummings has expanded his story into a narrative feature of the same name. That new feature arrives in theaters nationwide today.

The short film focused on one scene as Officer Jim Arnaud (Jim Cummings, who also wrote the screenplay) stood, rambled and eventually danced in front of a Church full of mourners while speaking about his late mother. From being offended that people don’t say thank you enough to dancing along to the title song, Jim veered from topic to topic with his emotions changing dramatically moment by moment.

The new feature film starts out with a similar sequence. Over the course of the rest of the movie though, Jim is brought more to life as we see him try to keep his life together while his world falls apart. Over the course of 90 minutes, he struggles to maintain a good relationship with his daughter while clearly traumatized by his loss.

The versatile Cummings imbues his lead character with a wonderful off-center personality. It’s hard to fully understand the complexity of the character or know what his next move will be. At times, he’s disquieting in his pain — mulling around, believing that life gave him a bad hand. At other times, there’s an anger inside of him that transforms him into a vengeful soul. At other times, he’s a well-intentioned officer trying to please his supervisor.

It’s a testament to the production here that Jim is allowed to be a chaotic jumble of emotions. He’s not a simple man and he’s tough to define but it’s also difficult to lose him in the story. He keeps our attention.

The feature explores the daily life of his character as he engages in a custody battle with his estranged wife (Jocelyn DeBoer). Early on, we watch as he valiantly tries to build a real connection with his daughter Crystal (Kendal Farr), a girl who would rather spend time with her mother. The duo share a tumultuous relationship but there are great subtle moments here where you see the characters breaking through to each other. Throughout the movie, it’s these small moments that really define this character unique character study.

A simple hand clapping game turns into a poignant moment of connection.  A conversation with his daughter’s teacher (Macon Blair) turns into a moment of great despair. A talk with Jim’s sister (Chelsea Edmundson) turns into a moment of great discovery.

There are admittedly other moments of great discomfort in the film, where the audience might be wondering if they should be laughing or simply empathizing. Cummings gives his character the room to be both a source of comedy (there are plenty of humorous moments here) and a sympathetic countenance that keeps the audience connected to Jim.

Thunder Road ultimately takes the short film of the same name to a different level here. The feature film takes the concept of the short film and really brings a fuller life to that complex lead character, capturing who he is as a father, as an officer and as a man. It takes a lot of vulnerability and openness for an actor to give so much to a role and Cummings offers that along with a film that will be hard to forget.

Review by: John Hanlon

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Thunder Road Reviews

• 73   Metascore
• 1 hr 32 mins
• Drama, Suspense, Action & Adventure
• Watchlist Where to Watch

A Korean War veteran returns to Kentucky to run the family moonshine business, while giving Feds the slip and keeping the racketeers at bay. Robert Mitchum stars and his son James Mitchum plays his younger brother.

One of the earliest, and by far the best, of the moonshine-running films starring Robert Mitchum, who not only wrote the original story, produced, and starred, but also wrote the theme song "Whippoorwill," which he later recorded and turned into a radio hit. If that isn't enough, Bob's 16-year-old son Jim made his movie debut playing his dad's brother. The fairly simple story line is a southern slice of life which sees Mitchum, Sr., coming home to Tennessee from Korea to take over operation of the family moonshine still. Worried that his kid brother, Mitchum, Jr., might get tangled up in the dangerous business, Mitchum, Sr., tries to discourage the rowdy youth from getting involved in the moonshine wars. Soon powerful mobster Aubuchon wants in on the elder Mitchum's action, and when his offers to buy out the operation are rudely rebuffed, the hoodlum sends some of his boys over to kill one of the family's truck drivers. Adding to Mitchum's troubles is Barry, a federal agent out to smash the moonshine trade. Mitchum, Sr., avenges his driver's death by beating up Aubuchon. This leads to all-out war between the mob and Mitchum. Eventually Mitchum, Sr., is captured by Aubuchon, but he is rescued by his brother. At this point, Barry steps in and arrests Aubuchon. Still deadset on ending the moonshine business, Barry sets out after Mitchum, Sr., and after a thrilling car chase through the backwoods, Mitchum, Sr., meets his end when his car speeds out of control and hits a power transformer which electrocutes him. Footage of the exciting crash was used in the weird THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN (1963). Popular vocalist Smith, with her unusual mannerisms and unique appearance, was an inspired choice as the love interest. Newcomer Knight, the secondary love interest, had her first featured role. The former wife of actor Jack Nicholson, Knight matriculated from this into low-budget horror films such as FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER (1959) and BLOOD BATH (1966). In 1975, young James Mitchum starred in a picture, MOONRUNNERS, with much the same theme as this moonshine-running benchmark. This has become a minor cult classic and is one of Mitchum's more interesting (and bizzare) efforts.

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Thunder Road Reviews

A fun example of how cool and influential a film can be without being particularly good.

Full Review | Feb 23, 2024

Robert Mitchum starred in, produced and wrote the story for this cult hit about a stampeding moonshine driver, and even got a hit song out of it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 29, 2023

Bruce Springsteen borrowed its title and Burt Reynolds appropriated its anti-'revenooer' appeal, but just shy of its 60th anniversary, 'Thunder Road' remains very much the property of its actor-as-auteur leading man, Robert Mitchum.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 15, 2015

The world of moonshine transporters is keyed to Mitchum's fatalist-hobo wryness

Full Review | Sep 25, 2009

The ultimate road movie.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jun 20, 2006

Southern drive-in staple Thunder Road is basically The Robert Mitchum Show.

Full Review | May 1, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 9, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 12, 2005

Mitchum as a booze runner is fun enough, but his singing of the title song is the plus.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 1, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 22, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 46/100 | Jun 14, 2003

Mitchum carries the movie on his massive shoulders.

Full Review | Aug 17, 2001

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Movie's ratings

• Kinorium 6.3 500+
• IMDb 7.0 19 412
• Critics 97% 87
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Critique: 18

Thunder Road is a tour de force for Jim Cummings, who wrote, directed and (according to the credits) «performed» it.

I have seen humanistic American filmmaking’s future, and its name is Jim Cummings.

The film shares something of its hero’s self-involvement. If you can accept that, however, Thunder Road is an impressive one-man-show.

Offers a memorable depiction of a man ill-equipped to deal with or direct his feelings-probably not all that different from the rest of us.

Cummings is a born filmmaker who plants seedlings of raw drama that sprout in unexpected and moving ways.

Remarkably, Cummings manages to piece these oddball vignettes into a vivid drama with its own unpredictable, startlingly lovely shape.

When Cummings finds the right balance of dramatic license and believable characterization, 'Thunder Road' is exhilarating to watch.

Dramatically, Thunder Road is a little thin, but the plot’s not the point: this is all about Cummings, who sparkles with charisma and co...

Cummings, who also wrote and directed the film, has delivered a remarkable tragicomic performance in the lead.

Cummings’s feature debut doesn’t always get the balance right, but when it does it packs a bittersweet punch.

Thunder Road lands on a tragic development, but upends it with a single teary-eyed moment that hints – with no real evidence ...

A performance showcase for star, writer, director, editor and composer Jim Cummings which leaves you in no doubt you’ll be seeing more of him.

Driven by Cummings' transfixingly vulnerable performance, the movie not only justifies returning to the source: Shockingly, it does so without even...

Such an unapologetic crisis of masculinity will strike some as self-indulgent in times such as these. Yet Cummings is so committed to Arnaud&rsquo...

Thunder Road is an exhilarating ride. It announces Jim Cummings as a talent to be reckoned with and dances on the jagged precipice of emotional con...

An emotional tour de force.

Cummings presents us with a guy whose heart is in the right place – he just can’t control himself.

It takes a few narrative risks that won’t win everyone over, but it allowed itself to be complex and conflicted about itself. That kept...

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Under the Bridge review – Lily Gladstone leads respectful yet bland true crime drama

The recent Oscar nominee plays a cop investigating the brutal death of a teen in this noble but clunky retelling of a horrifying crime on Hulu

A s a true crime drama in the year 2024, Hulu’s Under the Bridge at least knows the giant potholes of the genre to avoid. The eight-episode limited series starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough , an adaptation of Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 book on a sensational murder in Canada, knows not to glorify law enforcement as hyper-competent, or to privilege perpetrators’ emotional lives over a faceless victim’s, or to depict gratuitous violence. “I think people should be remembered for who they were, not what happened to them,” Keough, as Godfrey, tells the parents of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old girl horrifically beaten to death and drowned by both strangers and her so-called friends. As an exercise in how to make entertainment out of a real crime with real perpetrators and victims – particularly Virk, ably embodied by Vritika Gupta – Under the Bridge is self-aware and empathetic, clearly thinking through implications, its heart in the right place.

Unfortunately, as a television show, it often has the feeling of flat cola – tepid, stale and reminiscent of something buzzier and brighter. Though it assiduously dodges some of the worst of the so-called “dead girl” tropes, it falls prey to the most irksome ones of prestige streaming TV: bloated episode counts, multiple timelines, blurry formal shifts, portentous voiceovers, mistaking correct politics (on racism, incompetent law enforcement, trauma and more) for nuanced, compelling craft.

Though the crime itself is almost too awful to believe, there’s little to distinguish Under the Bridge, developed by the late Godfrey and Quinn Shephard, from other recent, better true-crime dramas such as Under the Banner of Heaven , The Staircase , The Act or The Girl from Plainville , nor from shows unraveling stomach-churning dead-girl crimes such as True Detective or Mare of Easttown. The series most overtly recalls the superlative Sharp Objects, HBO’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel, in that it also revolves around an unscrupulous, capital-T Troubled journalist returning to investigate the shocking murder of a teenage girl in her small home town, after escaping the tragic death of a sibling. But whereas Amy Adams’ cliched-to-hell unethical journalist was at least compelling, and the late Jean-Marc Vallée’s vision of midwestern Gothic hypnotic, Under the Bridge runs cold, even as it tries to capture the inexplicably white-hot rage of teenage girls (and one ill-placed, murderously angry teenage boy, played by Euphoria’s Javon Walton) on Vancouver Island in British Columbia in 1997.

The leaders of those girls are indeed terrifying – Josephine Brooks (Chloe Guidry) the alpha dog prone to bite swift and hard, Kelly Ellard (Izzy G) the chilling, lethal beta predator. The girls were self-styled “gangstas” who idolized John Gotti and fetishized mob violence; they practiced their cruelty on Dusty (Aiyana Goodfellow), a Black fellow resident at Josephine’s group home, and particularly on Reena, a shy and yearning outcast desperate for friends, nursing a nascent obsession with the Notorious BIG. (The series gestures just enough at the late-90s moral panic over pop culture’s influence on teenagers.)

The first half of the series unspools both the “gang” allure to a young outcast like Reena and the months, days, hours and minutes before her death. Reena was isolated – the eldest daughter in a south Asian family, her mother Suman (Archie Panjabi) a devout Jehovah’s Witness, her father Manjit (Ezra Faroque Khan) a Sikh immigrant from India, she was a minority within a minority on a very white island. Even in death, her life was dismissed – as a non-priority and “bic girl runaway” by the Saanich police (the moniker was “because we’re disposable”, says Dusty, in one of many heavy-handed lines). Only Godfrey, home from New York to write a book on Victoria’s disaffected youth, and officer Cam Bentland (Gladstone), a fellow outsider as an Indigenous woman adopted by the police chief (Matt Craven), take Reena’s disappearance seriously.

Gladstone, though occasionally prone to overacting, has always imbued her characters with a deep well of dignity, and does so again despite working with little characterization beyond “lonely and sad” as a Native woman adopted into a casually racist white family – a trait that highlights shameful Canadian national crimes, though is not enough for a whole person. Still, Gladstone is a reassuring on-screen presence, even if she’s forced to visibly wince at every mention of the word “race” or her boss/dad’s invocation of “sweetheart”. Keough, who rose above the middling Daisy Jones and the Six, is likewise underserved by the material; her portrayal of Rebecca as a hall-of-fame boundary-less, self-absorbed journalist – one who sleeps with a law enforcement source and does drugs with a teenage one – is at least watchable, if hardly palatable.

The thread of her “investigation”, if one could call it that, is hard to take, but at least there are others – most interestingly, if not smoothly, Reena’s dramatic rebellion against her parents in the months before her death. The fourth episode, written by Stuti Malhotra and directed by Nimisha Mukerji, epitomizes the promise and pitfalls of this sprawl, juxtaposing the Virks’ family history as immigrants in British Columbia with a humiliating, hard-to-watch dinner they host for Reena’s soon-to-be attackers. The lines are on-the-nose and clunky, the episode too long, but the point stands: there was more to this story then, a different, better way to tell it now. If only its practice kept up with its principles.

Under the Bridge is available on Hulu in the US with a UK date to be announced

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