Roadie [Blu-ray]

Real People Who Love Music With Some Very Real Problems
Jimmy was a roadie for Blue Oyster Cult all his adult life who has - painfully and wrongfully according to him - been fired by the band and left by them somewhere in the wilds of Michigan. With nowhere else to go, he makes his way back home to Queens where he has not been since his father's death many, many years before. He has barely spoken with his mother in the interim and now he overstates his role with the band to her - manager, writer, producer, etc. He tries to collect himself to deal with this massive setback, but he is not making the situation any better with angry calls to the band's actual manager.

I think that roadie is one of the coolest jobs in the world next to rock star and Jimmy does as well. I, too, would have major problems dealing with his rude awakening after so many years and the loss of his livelihood and dream.

Out for some butter for his Mom's famous tuna melts, Jimmy runs into a high school classmate who is and was quite a butthead...

Roadie gives look at what happens when lights go out
By Jim Clark, publisher Lee County Courier, Tupelo, MS

Jimmy Testagross (Ron Eldard) has been living his dream for over 20 years. He has been a roadie for Blue Oyster Cult. The key words are "has been." Blue Oyster Cult has quit filling large arenas and have cut back on equipment and personnel. Jimmy is a victim of that downsizing.
Since Jimmy doesn't have any other skill sets he limps back home to his mother.
He hasn't seen her or talked to her since his father died. She is developing Dementia. The band continues to tour in South America but Jimmy's repeated calls go unanswered.
After seeing what has happened to his mom he makes up a more successful Jimmy. He says he's become the band's manager, even produced and written some songs for them and is simply visiting before he must get on the road again because, "they are lost without him."
Downtrodden he walks into town to get a drink. There he becomes reacquainted with his longtime nemesis Randy Stevens...

Some movies just speak to you
I'll admit a bias here: I'm a small-town guy who headed to Hollywood to pursue my musical dreams. As it turns out, this movie had little to do with music and musicians--it had a lot to do with a man returning home to the neighborhood of his youth, lost, and in that it succeeded wonderfully.

It's no surprise some have labeled Roadie "slow" or "boring"--character studies eschew the busy-ness of plot-driven movies for the subtle, the understatement. There were many moments in the film where I expected it to decay into melodrama or the big message, and above all I applaud the writer(s) and director for avoiding that. This is Death of a Salesman type fare, a story about a man who thought he knew what his life was about suddenly faced with a new, harsh reality. For some, life plays out in big dramatic moments--cancer, heart attack, accident--but for many more it plays out in small pieces of entropy, and that's the case here.

Certainly my small town background and four...

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