'Roadie' -- Fictional story follows ups and downs with former Blue Oyster Cult staffer
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Ron Eldard, left, Jill Hennessy and Bobby Cannavale are high school friends who reconnect in "Roadie."
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Jimmy Testagross will do just about anything to get back out there.
Beg. Bargain. Wheedle. Threaten.
"I gotta be on the road. It just doesn't feel right not touring," he says into the phone from some anonymous hotel room.
He's not a member of the band. He's with the band, or he was until Blue Oyster Cult cut him loose after 26 years.
"Roadie" finds Jimmy (Ron Eldard) broke and back at his widowed mother's house in Queens. He is indispensable to BOC, he insists, to himself as much as others.
- Starring: Ron Eldard, Jill Hennessy, Bobby Cannavale, Lois Smith.
- Rating: R for pervasive language and some drug content.
His boyhood bedroom is just as he left it, with old copies of now-defunct Circus magazine, music posters on the paneled walls, and rock albums by the likes of The Good Rats from Long Island and others, along with a working turntable.
Some of his high school friends are still in Forest Hills, too, including long-ago girlfriend Nikki (Jill Hennessy), now an aspiring singer-songwriter, and hard-partying Bobby (Bobby Cannavale), a businessman by virtue of his father's death.
Jimmy has to confront ghosts, dreams and disappointments of the past and face what aging is doing to his lonely mother and her elderly neighbors.
Mr. Eldard, who played Elle Fanning's steelworker dad in "Super 8," is given the showcase of his career in "Roadie." When he takes off his shirt and stares at his sorry self in a mirror, that is his gut -- with 38 pounds he packed on for the film.
He's at his best when his face is a study in vulnerability -- lovesick and sad upon seeing Nikki for the first time in years or tearfully angry in recounting a life-changing incident his mother doesn't even remember.
As his mom, Lois Smith can play physical and mental deterioration along with the ability to tell her son to, essentially, man up. Now 81 years old, she has been nominated for Tony Awards but also has a long list of other stage, film and TV credits that make her face more familiar than her name.
Ms. Hennessy from "Law & Order" and "Crossing Jordan" released her debut CD, "Ghost in My Head," in 2009 and pulls off the singer-songwriter role while Mr. Cannavale channels his character's inner jerk to play a man who's never grown up.
"Roadie" is from director Michael Cuesta, who made a name for himself with 2001's "L.I.E" (short for Long Island Expressway), about a lost 15-year-old who falls in with a hale, hearty fellow who is a secret pedophile. Michael and his brother, Gerald Cuesta, wrote this screenplay and say Jimmy represents both of them along with guys they knew growing up on Long Island.
A couple of moments -- where people choose to party and a fight that leaves Jimmy's face as bruised as his ego -- seem contrived or false. You don't need to be a rocker, though, to appreciate the symbolism of a man who slumbers in a car that's rusting and going nowhere.
The movie features footage of real Blue Oyster Cult roadies and the song "The Load Out." about the guys who roll the cases and lift the amps. That isn't Jackson Browne's voice serenading you at the end but Adam Duritz.
"Roadie" is like an old-fashioned vinyl record with a couple of scratches and bit of dust; it's imperfect but it still plays.
Opens today at the Hollywood Theater, Dormont.
First Published January 26, 2012 12:00 am
