Movie Review: "Thunder Road" Is a Special Comedy About Death, Dance and All That Jazz

Everybody grieves in their own way. Only a few do it with jazz hands.

Thunder Road began as a 12-minute short about a police officer who cannot understand or articulate his grief, but commits to a reputation-destroying eulogy for his mother at her funeral anyway.

That now serves as the opening, unbroken shot (with one major, perfect change) of writer, director and star Jim Cummings' feature-length adaptation, also titled Thunder Road. Here, that vulnerable, confused and audacious eulogy—which includes a failed attempt to perform an interpretive dance to a Bruce Springsteen song—becomes just the beginning of Officer Jim Arnaud’s downward spiral, rather than its cathartic end.

During the service, a parishioner whips out their phone and records Officer Cummings’ open-hearted farewell. Later, when Jim’s cop partner Nate (Nican Robinson) asks how it all went, Jim replies, "Everything went normal." And things gradually get much worse from there. Though, not the movie. This thing just keeps getting better and better, becoming an always unpredictable delight.

Despite starting with the exceptional monologue that encouraged punters to initially donate $36,000 to Cummings' Kickstarter campaign for a 90-minute extension, Thunder Road does not nosedive from that early high point. Rather, it takes flight.

Arnaud returns to work too quickly, patrolling his small town Texas community, and he fights with his estranged wife (Jocelyn DeBoer) over their daughter Crystal (Kendal Farr). We are a passenger on his patrol too. Lowell A. Meyer’s compassionate cinematography patiently tracks in on the talkative Jim as he gets into bigger and more disastrous pickles with his ex, his boss, Crystal’s teacher and eventually a judge. It’s hard to watch Jim do himself in so thoroughly, but then, why would you want to look elsewhere? Something special’s unfolding before your eyes.

Cummings is so very compelling as the centre of this strange, dark comedy, regularly oscillating from ugly-crying to composed, often within the space of a sentence. His Officer Arnaud is the most heightened figure within this world—sometimes seeming like a character ripped out of Reno 911—yet his actions are never more outsized than his all-encompassing grief. As a writer and director, Cummings cuts to the irrefutable fact of death: there’s really no such thing as 'handling it well'. The miracle—so long as you can see it that way—is that life indeed keeps on going. I’m so thankful the short film Thunder Road keeps on going as well in this new, deeply moving and hilarious form.

4.5/5

Thunder Road arrives in select Melbourne cinemas on 18 April. It opens in Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart, Perth and Sydney on 25 April. Rated M for mature themes and coarse language.