Thunder Road **** (2018, Jim Cummings, Kendal Farr, Nican Robinson) – Movie Review

Writer-director Jim Cummings also stars brilliantly in the clever, charming and heartfelt Thunder Road (2018) as police officer Jim Arnaud, who goes into a personal meltdown after his divorce and the death of his mother, leading to an all-round collapse that there looks no way back from. He just loses it. He loses everything.

It is a total tour-de-force in all departments. His darkly comedic turn starts a bit broad and untidy, though impressive, but it bites in, and starts to bite hard. And by the end it hits the emotions as well as the funny bone, and it leaves an indelible impression. It has a sense of real emotional pain, agony in fact, that leads a good man to do crazy, desperate things.

Kendal Farr plays the cop’s ex-wife Crystal Arnaud and Nican Robinson plays his sympathetic police partner buddy Officer Nate Lewis. They are good too.

Thunder Road is Cummings’s feature debut but it is based on his 2016 short that premiered and won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize award at the Sundance Film Festival. It was described as ‘a one shot monologue about a man melting down is a mini masterpiece of writing, directing and acting. This filmmaker is a real discovery.’ The Thunder Road feature starts with a long, unbroken long take brio performance of the hero eulogising his mother at her funeral, which is the part taken from the short film.

It screens at the BFI London Film Festival on 10 October 2018.

It has no relation to Thunder Road, the 1958 Robert Mitchum film.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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