I really wish I could recommend the documentary Driver 23 as this week's movie pick but Director Rolf Belgum really shit the bed on this one, and what could have been a miraculously perfect documentary left me frustrated, wishing someone with more skill had made the film. Even if it were made for 700 dollars he could have bothered to actually hold the camera a little more and let the interesting subjects talk without cutting them off.
Still, with that warning I say see it anyways- because the subject, one Dan Cleveland is unbelievably fascinating. He's a man who seems to be constantly in a Herculean struggle against the noise in his head, gravity (which he fights with the laws of physics and mouse trap caliber contraptions) and the world at large.
Armed with duct tape, which he uses for everything including a home made recording studio, cinder block exercise equipment, a double neck guitar, and I swear, at one point shoes, he is fighting against the daily grind of his daytime job, his distant clown wife (literally a clown, most of her interviews are done as she takes on or off the makeup) and band mates that keep quitting on him.
His band Dark Horse is his curly long hair obsession (next to duct tape) and you really want to root for his dream which he can envision with such positivity even as things crumble around him. He is half delusional half genius and wrought with the struggle of being bipolar and heavily medicated with the American dream weighing heavily on his back. While you may find yourself laughing at some points, you can't deny the man's will to carry on in a world that doesn't seem to want him to.
But what do you think?