THUNDER ROAD: A Hilarious & Heartfelt Introduction To An Extraordinary Comic Performer

When we first see Officer Jim Arnaud, making his way to the podium to eulogise his mother at her funeral service, he casts an unassuming figure. Ten minutes later, and the opening sequence to Thunder Road has proven to be a fully fleshed out character study of its own.

Carefully balancing tragedy and comedy in a way few performers can manage effectively, the audience is guided through a barrage of fraught emotions and tangential non-sequiturs that all give a greater impression of the character in a single one-take sequence than most films manage in their entirety. Before Thunder Road has even properly begun, you are left with no doubt: Jim Cummings is one of the most impressive comic actors to have emerged in recent memory.

Emotionally raw, without compromising the laughs

This opening sequence is adapted closely from his 2016 short of the same name, and as a result, possesses a swaggering confidence that doesn’t call attention to itself; Cummings is such a captivating performer on camera, it would be easy to overlook just how technically accomplished it is. The question once this is over is whether or not he can expand upon this one-gag premise for a feature focusing on the bereavement trauma Officer Arnaud is facing.

The result is a resounding yes, transforming the character into a rage fueled man-baby of the Ferrell and Sandler varieties, but with an underlying melancholy that never treats his personal issues as something to be joked about. It’s a deceptively simple character study, that handles a plethora of raw emotions with an effective lightness of touch – heartfelt, without compromising on the hilarity.

Jim Arnaud’s life is falling apart after a public display of vulnerability at his mother’s funeral. His boss has forced him to take time out of work due to the rawness of his wounds, and he’s also fighting a bitter custody battle with the ex-wife he divorced from a year earlier. To make matters worse, his young daughter Crystal (Kendal Farr) is falling behind at school, increasing her misbehaviour in class. We follow Jim as he navigates the different crises facing him, and how these effect his already diminished mental state.

The most impressive thing about Thunder Road is how it easily circumnavigates the issue of Jim’s mental health – everything about him is played for laughs with this one exception. One of the best recurring jokes, about his lifelong struggle with dyslexia and his worry on passing that down through generations, is a perfect way of addressing this; he’s so consumed by feeling a quick succession of strong emotions at any one time, he never stops to address the bigger picture clearly facing him, looking for different scapegoats in any given moment.

His methods of handling distressing situations, ignoring pleas to speak to a therapist, are frequently hilarious. The sight of a grown man responding to his daughter’s school teacher (a funny Macon Blair cameo) telling him that she’s failing class by picking up a desk and walking around the room clutching it is one of many sequences that, in its gloriously silly simplicity, manage to outdo any big set piece from recent studio comedies. The fact it works equally as an examination of the character’s mental state, laughing at the situation but not his emotional scars, shows that not a single moment in the film is wasted when it comes to developing Jim’s worldview.

One of the best comic performances of the decade

Cummings’ performance feels perfectly calibrated throughout, despite the weighty subject matter at hand. There are the big outbursts of anger, that feel like an update of the earlier physical comedy performances of Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler, twinned with an unusual dialogue rhythm – a character constantly interrupting themselves with tangential thoughts, or corrections to statements made minutes earlier. The screenplay is pitched somewhere between early Ricky Gervais and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia due to the “speaking before thinking” nature of the lead character – although it goes without saying that despite the clear similarities in the gag deliveries, this is a far more heartfelt proposition than either.

When the Thunder Road short premiered in 2016, it became the darling of that year’s festival circuit picking up numerous awards and rapturous acclaim – Indiewire even went so far as to call it one of the best short films ever made. And while that short holds up, revisiting it after watching the subsequent feature shows just how much Cummings has grown as an actor; the dialogue is largely the same, but he’s lived with this character so long, it now feels more authentic than it did before. Like Steve Coogan with Alan Partridge, you get the sense that he has an innate understanding of the character and his backstory without ever needing to meticulously overthink it – it’s key to what makes something that seems like a textbook comedy archetype on paper (a voice of authority who is irreparably emotionally immature) feel unique in practice.

After all, he’s managed to tweak the central gag of that short (a bad song and dance rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s song) into an even better joke here, as he can’t even get the audio to play, leaving him to mime a dance routine to silence in front of a presumably baffled audience. It instantly shows he has an even tighter command on making the laughs and the character study work in tandem than before.

Conclusion: Thunder Road

With Thunder Road, we witness the birth of a comic actor who could very well grow into one of the finest of this generation. Marrying hilarity and heartbreak, Cummings’ film is a well crafted character study that has achieved the impossible feat of fleshing out an earlier one-joke short into an even more effective feature that’s one of the funniest films to have emerged from the festival circuit in recent memory.

Thunder Road is currently doing the rounds on the festival circuit, with no current release date. All release dates will be found here when available. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXThAUVBGjE