Mark Reviews Movies: HARD LUCK LOVE SONG

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | October 14, 2021

Jesse (Michael Dorman) is a man with a dream and not much else. He's the focus of Hard Luck Love Song, co-writer/director Justin Corsbie's rambling movie about a rambler of a man. It is, somewhat admirably, not about much more than how this guy lives, scrapes and hustles a living, and keeps edging closer and closer to the kind of trouble he can't fix or escape. There's bad trouble here, of course, in the form of heavy drinking, lots of gambling with money he doesn't actually have, and tempting fate by conning more and more people. The worst trouble with Jesse, perhaps, is that he can't accept or appreciate a good thing.

Corsbie and Craig Ugoretz's screenplay is based on, of all things, a song, called "Just Like Old Times," by indie singer-songwriter Todd Snider. The tune, performed by the musician at a live show during the credits, is a jokey little piece of storytelling, and if anything, Corsbie and Ugoretz should be commended for finding the kernel of an interesting character in the tune and expanding that idea here.

Jesse enters the movie as a mystery, beaten and seemingly defeated in a flash-forward prologue, before we see him driving a lonesome desert highway toward his next destination, wherever that may be, somewhere out West. Listening to country music and always smoking the next cigarette on the drive, Jesse also has a cast on his left hand and wrist.

There's no explanation for the injury, but after spending a little bit of time with the guy during his usual routine on his next stop to nowhere in particular, we don't exactly need one. Jesse makes money in the kind of ways that might make someone of such inclination want to break one of his appendages. At one point on his adventures in this new town, one such person threatens to cut off his other hand.

To cut ahead a bit, Jesse is a hustler, specializing in the game of pool and just as convincing in downplaying how adept he is. That becomes one of the several threads of this mostly aimless story—and one of fewer that hint at something closer to an actual plot. For the most part, Corsbie is simply content to observe Jesse, as he hangs out in his motel room—listening to music on a portable record player and breaking out his guitar to perform one of his own songs, before inevitably being reduced to quiet tears—and wanders this place, looking for something to do.

That "something" consists of polite chats with strangers, buying booze for the downtime in the motel room, and those lonely moments in the room. Jesse passes a homeless man at one point on his strolls, promising to give the man some money on the way back. He just happens to find a hundred-dollar bill on his walk. Sure enough, Jesse is a man of his word, giving the stranger a bottle of wine and most of his change from buying the bottle, as well as more beer for himself.

Jesse might look and behave like a selfish, unprincipled guy, doing what he must to keep his roving lifestyle going, while also creating the circumstances to necessitate that kind of living. Well, he is that, too, but the man has a kind and wounded heart beneath all of that. Some of it has to do with Carla (Sophia Bush), an old flame of his, who just happens to live in this town. Jesse calls Carla and invites her to the motel, and the two go back to chatting, joking, flirting, and, inevitably, arguing, as if no time has passed between them.

Corsbie and Ugoretz spend a lot of time establishing and solidifying these details, which aren't much, about Jesse, who's played with a wealth of charm and an underlying melancholy by Dorman. There is something to appreciate—again, not much—in the ways the movie falls into a laidback rhythm, which mirrors the character's own attitude, and almost goes out of its way to avoid any form of conflict.

The hints and realities of conflict arise, for sure. The main one, following a lengthy set of pool-playing montages, leads to Jesse getting on the bad side of local pool shark Rollo (Dermot Mulroney). Another involves a curious cop (played by Brian Sacca), who arrives at the motel room looking for drugs that are definitely in the room. Yet another involves Louis (RZA), who puts an end to one skirmish before quickly starting another that seems to come out of nowhere.

If the movie struggles to maintain a sense of purpose beyond the limited details of the protagonist and Dorman's performance, its simple intentions more or less fall apart in an extended, climactic scene. In it, all of Jesse's problems—and then some—erupt into successive instances of violence. It's as if the screenwriters, realizing how much conflict they have evaded so far, decided to cram every bit of plot they possessed into the movie's final minutes. In compacting and resolving all of the conflicts this movie has to offer, Hard Luck Love Song reveals just how little there is to this story and character.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products