All you need to make a compelling indie film is a boy, a bike, and the open road. Add two dueling father figures, a venomous home life, and a loose coming-of-age story, mix, and serve. Walkaway Joe, the debut feature from veteran actor Tom Wright, combines all these elements into a delightful bildungsroman that’s more than the sum of its been-there-done-that parts.
Skip School, Play Pool
The film, released in May 2020, is a sad-dad kid-on-the-run drama. Julian Feder plays Dallas McCarthy, whose dad, Cal (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is a pool hall hustler and nine-ball-shooter looking to make easy money and stay out of trouble. Dallas’ home is a nightmare. Cal’s abusive toward his wife, Gina (Julie Ann Emery), and one morning, they get into a heated argument. “Did it ever occur to you to be his parent instead of his playmate?” she demands. Cal walks out, and we follow Dallas for 90 minutes as he runs away, too, to find Dad.
Cal’s the latest enigmatic, gruff, grizzly bear father-figure type, a species that American indie cinema adores. Mud, Boyhood, Joe, Lean on Pete, We Are Animals — each bad dad more charming and yet worse than the last, all of them in dire financial straits and played by character actors at the top of their game.
Morgan rocks the hell out of Walkaway Joe. The actor’s on a hot streak — he’s been the most charismatic presence on The Walking Dead for years and has owned some great blockbuster supporting roles. Here, he takes the broadest of character traits — compulsive liar, gambler, womanizer, abuser, egotist — and turns them into a three-piece suit and a top hat. He has the wolfish candor of a man who’s never known anything else in life but the rush of a winning streak and a clean ball off the side pocket of the you-know-the-rest. “It’s in my blood,” Cal tells his son, though it’s as much a curse as a blessing.
Cal’s a minor monster, but at the same time, Morgan turns the room electric. It’s like how you know Jonathan Groff’s King George III in Hamilton sucks yet you get giddy whenever he’s onstage.
Searching For Sad Dad
We see a bit of Cal in Feder’s performance. Machismo affectations, like the bone-white cowboy hat he looks so small in or the badass veneer he puts on for nine-ball games, betrays his desire to emulate his father. (All Feder‘s angst conceals how little he resembles his supposedly 14-year-old character.) Without money or a ride to travel across Louisiana, Dallas begrudgingly accepts help from drifter Joe Haley (David Strathairn), who lives in an RV. I like to imagine Strathairn shot this side-by-side with Nomadland.
Joe’s a pensioner and a tai-chi practitioner. He trains in the mornings beside his camper, which looks a little silly. But then again, Straithairn did two Bourne movies and could probably kick the shit out of me, and I did Taekwondo for 12 years.
Michael Milillo’s screenplay plugs in artificial subplots to keep the tension going — police, loan sharks, boxes of cash — but this isn’t The Hustler. The film has some spectacularly staged nine-ball matches in its climax, but it’s not about nine-ball; it’s a character study, a subdued, soulful three-hander among Morgan, Strathairn, and Feder. Dallas and Joe, of course, bond, as Dallas learns his father might not be someone to look up to and Joe earns a shot at redemption. The conflict of being caught between two paternal figures is smartly captured by Christopher Beck and Jake Monaco’s score, mostly comprising two dueling guitars.
Nine-Ball Rules
Contrived and narratively fixed though it is, Walkaway Joe has an unmistakable ring of truth. Dallas lives in a poor neighborhood in one of those copy-paste one-story homes. His mom’s struggling to pay the bills, and his father’s in debt over his head. The kid’s life is fenced off from the rest of the world for reasons outside of his control. Dallas is named for a city he may never get to see.
In some parts of the world, spiders travel through the sky by ballooning on the air currents with their webs. In others, highways have to be sandbagged to protect against rising tides. And in Walkaway Joe’s Louisiana, in Dallas’ neighborhood, the mailboxes are all slanted, like they’d been knocked by passing cars and never straightened, half the houses don’t have paved driveways, and the trains, coal plants, and shipping barges you can see from the highway will probably employ most of Dallas’ friends, schoolmates, and fellow nine-ball players.
Contrary to the textbook portrayal of the Southern United States — one of the backwater slums, drug use, racism, rampant moral decline, and violent conflict — Walkaway Joe takes a more empathetic road and tells a gentle, soulful, and tragic story. Louisiana feels naturalistic and shady through cinematographer Steven Bernstein — it’s not all bayou swelter and washed-out, dry yellows, but rather cool, grey tarmac tones and the night-swamp blues of the pool dens.
Conclusion
At first glance, Walkaway Joe seems like little more than a run-of-the-mill kitchen sink drama with a nine-ball angle. But Wright’s film is remarkably poignant. It’s a nice, warm salve of a movie, a charming indie gem about the things in life you can’t run away from and the giants you have to topple to become your own person. And best of all, you don’t need to know a thing about nine-ball to enjoy it.
Who’s your favorite indie cinema bad dad? Ethan Hawke? Matthew McConaughey? Comment below and let us know.
Walkaway Joe is now playing in select theaters and VOD
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