A minor masterpiece, Backroad Blues is hilariously absurd and tragic—like America itself. Its Missourian drifter, Chip, reminds us that adaptability comes with the social territory of shallow opportunism; his survival is an endless, inhuman repetition of a wee range of behavior. Fellow rural drifter Kent (Alec Jennings, marvelous) is the opposite: an aching mass of humanity looking for work. The search for work is what’s important to Chip; job-as-destination matters to Kent, who needs to send money back home to his wife and 8-year-old daughter, and who dreams of creating for them a better life.

     Writer-director-cinematographer-editor Blake Eckard, himself as young as his two twentysomething protagonists, elliptically proceeds through his radical vision of American dead-ends and seize-able opportunities; key narrative moments unfold offscreen as we carefully listen to keep up. Eckard’s fadeouts can be long and deep, and the studied, unnatural sounds of Chip’s nonsensical, self-serving persona, during one such spell of screen-blackout, linger on the soundtrack. Eckard captures the smooth and the rough of the Midwest, the flat farmland, and cornfields and tangle of woods. Violence—whether in the form of theft or suicide-by-mercenary-proxy—bursts out of such a landscape, helping to define it.

     Chip’s chipper irresponsibility intensifies Kent’s responsibility to a point of insupportable burden and sense of masculine disgrace. Along the way in this road movie (Kent’s truck is the main “indoor” setting), Kent’s comic explosions of frustration recall Elmer Fudd’s until his crushed spirit is no laughing matter. Kent embodies the perpetual frustration that many discover as they attempt to navigate what American myth assures them are easily accessed highways to success in the U.S. Too many of us end up living the blues on unpaved backroads.

     Chip and Kent are aspects of a single character. Feckless Chip wins out.

-Reviewed by online critic Dennis Grunes, August, 2007.