Ejected From a Job With a Band, Landing Back With Mom in Queens
About an hour into “Roadie,” a film about a middle-aged rock ’n’ roll Sherpa who’s lost his job and moorings, there’s a jumpy, viscerally uncomfortable scene in a motel room — a tempest fueled by booze and coke, old grudges and new hurts — that’s so strong and beautifully played that it lifts the movie out of its doldrums. A roadie, Jimmy Testagross (a gruffly tender Ron Eldard), has crawled back to his childhood home in Forest Hills, Queens, after being cut free by his longtime employer, Blue Oyster Cult. From his wounded look it seems as if he weren’t only fired, but also stripped of his identity. Refusing to admit the truth, even to himself, he tells everyone he’s the band’s manager.
Middle-aged losers and burnouts are a favorite of the movies, the sagging-gut analogues to all those bright young men struggling and invariably finding their ways despite the odds, their families and circumstances. As his name implies, Jimmy (it’s impossible to imagine anyone calling him James), hasn’t fully grown up, at least in the conventional sense of what it means to be an adult (no wife, no brood, no house). He’s throwing a tantrum when the movie opens, yelling into his cellphone about his old job and kicking a wall. There’s something juvenile about his outrage — he’s a hothead but with none of an adult man’s menace — an immaturity that implies weakness.
This suggested softness turns out to be one of Jimmy’s strengths, as becomes clear from his interactions, particularly with his mother, simply known as Mom (Lois Smith), and an old high school bully, Bobby (a very fine, blustering Bobby Cannavale ). A large, initial stretch of the story involves Jimmy’s awkward reunion with his mother, who’s happy to see him and angry that it’s taken so long for him to visit. These scenes fill in the background and its bedeviling ghost (photographs of Jimmy’s dead father outnumber the religious tchotchkes), and vividly get across why it’s taken so long for Jimmy to return to that claustrophobic nest with its puce accent notes and tough love.
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This suggested softness turns out to be one of Jimmy's strengths, as becomes clear from his interactions, particularly with his mother, simply known as Mom (Lois Smith), and an old high school bully, Bobby (a very fine, blustering Bobby Cannavale).
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