Thunder Road makes cringe comedy from despair

Like the best moments in the film, it walks the line between cringe comedy and sincere anguish. We see the mustachioed, nicotine-gum-chewing Jimmy as a man cornered, on one side, by a social obligation to say and do something meaningful, and, on the other, by an emotional survival instinct that tells him to run and hide. His life is a mess of frictions. He’s going through a divorce; his 10-year-old daughter, Crystal (Kendal Farr), is getting in trouble at school; and though he still thinks he’ll share custody of the kid with his venomous ex, Roz (Jocelyn DeBoer), the deck seems stacked against him. The one-sided, one-dimensional supporting characters are the weak spot of Cummings’ script. But we still get the sense that Jimmy’s problems are self-made. He is incapable of admitting that anything is truly wrong: not to his tireless, caring partner (Nican Robinson) or the rest of the guys on the force; not to Roz or the family-court judge; possibly not even to himself.

Instead, Jimmy swings from playing nice to completely losing it—from soft-spoken chitchat to outbursts and death threats—and back again, with pathological apologies (“I’m sorry if I committed a hate crime against you”) and overcompensations in between. Cummings’ style is theatrical, sometimes employing whoppingly long takes, but it owes as much to the man-child freakouts of Will Ferrell and the comedies of boiling frustration of Jody Hill as it does to the stage. (For what it’s worth, Cummings’ performance is reminiscent of a Will Forte character.) Whether Thunder Road itself has something meaningful to say is an open question, though the way Jimmy draws a gun during a climactic scene suggests that Cummings has some ideas about the state and reflexes of American policing on his mind. Through a combination of caricature and psychological portrait, subtle touches and howls of impotent, uniformed rage, his film 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.