Thunder Road (Jim Cummings, 2018) (Patreon)

I suppose in retrospect it makes sense that this was a short film first. The funeral is, indeed, a showstopping set-piece of anguished discomfort, and one could imagine it as a stand-alone work of cringy "art." In a way, this detachability -- the idea that a moment like that could be taken out of context and used to define everything the follows -- is the basic idea of Thunder Road's larger plot, and so if I didn't immediately notice that this was one of those features expanded from a calling-card, it's probably because writer-director-performer Jim Cummings had the intelligence to make that "expansion" into the implicit theme of the film itself.

Having said that, there is a strange sense of otherworldliness that envelops Thunder Road, a premise-driven attitudinizing that seems to be extrapolated from the realities of Texan masculinity without actually capturing its real stakes. Would Jimmy's funeral dance and emotional breakdown actually be enough to ruin his entire life, serving as hard evidence in court that he's an unfit parent? It seems a bit far-fetched, but then Cummings seems to be walking a razor-thin line between true pathos and Hill / McBride style ironization, which only adds to the overall discomfort. As the film, and Jimmy, spiral down into actual tragedy, we are never sure at what point we were supposed to have stopped laughing, and so the film edges past the McBride marker, out of the Solondz city limit, and swerves its pickup right into the middle of Frownland.