Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets

2020's BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS was a film I expected to love, but from the first minutes I curiously felt distanced from its action.  The engagement was rarely there.  We're in a Las Vegas dive bar called Roaring 20s.  Tomorrow it will shutter forever.  Many of the regulars come to hoist a drink and ramble endlessly for the last time, or at least until they find another such place.   But these poor, mostly downtrodden souls have formed a family of sorts, not so easily replaced?  One, an Aussie who carries a suspicious brown bag and decides to remove his pants at one point because, what the hell, states that his real family are a mess and his compadres in boozing provide the acceptance and comfort he never had.  Another used to be an actor and warns one of the younger barflies to get his act together before it's too late, before he becomes another guy who used to do things but now hangs out in bars. 

The film has what you might expect from such an atmosphere.  Ersatz philosophy.  A near fistfight.  Soul baring.  Flirting.  Arguments.  Regrets.  A variety of music from the jukebox.  All the right ingredients, all things you would see and hear in a real bar.  BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS is billed as a documentary, but is in fact a pseudo doc.  Most of the cast were recruited from saloons and actually do get inebriated onscreen, but everything is staged under the eyes of directors Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV.  This odd hybrid of documentary/fiction perhaps felt at arms' length to me because of this.  

While the dialogue was improvised, everything else felt too orchestrated in its attempts to feel realistic.  Or to hammer home points or be clever, such as the repeated zooms on the bar's TV screens showing old movies and the use of Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" at the end.  It's another project that craves honesty but felt dishonest.  The Rosses should have either decided to capture actual folks or just gone forward with straight fiction.   To boot, the assembled bunch here, while having a vivid moment here and there, are just not that interesting, or at least less so than the people I've encountered those handful of nights I've spent in shithole places like the Roaring 20s, which of course didn't exist and wasn't even in Vegas!

I have to be fair and report that there are some truly great moments.  A few big laughs.  The closing scenes are effective, as is the slide show during the credits.  Michael Martin, the only professional actor in the ensemble, is credible as a (more or less) career drunk who looks much older than his 58 years. 

You might wonder if my opinion would've been different had I not known that the film was faked beforehand.  I do have to say that, at times, it does capture the spontaneity one might see in real life, but I probably would've still detected the contrivances that bleed through the attempts at authenticity.  I kept thinking that Sean (THE FLORIDA PROJECT) Baker would've given this film the true cache it seeks.