After getting fired from his gig with Blue Oyster Cult, a roadie named Jimmy (Ron Eldard) comes home to Queens, N.Y., to lick his wounds. He hasn’t returned to the old neighborhood in 25-some years, and it feels like little has changed. His mother is carping, the corner bar is still standing, and his two high school friends — Bobby Cannavale and Jill Hennessey — remain his tormentor and his crush, respectively. Jimmy tells big lies about his life on the road, but the irony is: Nobody really cares, everybody’s stuck in the same holding patterns and Jimmy is still filed away as a loser. Michael Cuesta’s low-key film is less a character study than a snapshot of a particular generation: small fish in small ponds, dissatisfied but not enough so to make a change. It remains to be seen if Jimmy’s bumpy homecoming proves illuminating to him.
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2012.
