Giving heavy credence to blokes of a certain age – and likely targeted at them too – this noir thriller lands squarely in Coen brothers territory and does a creditable job holding its own there. Set in the mid-90s and starring character actor Scoot McNairy as veteran salesman Cliff, flogging defibrillators on the north-western stretch of the Interstate 90, it packs just enough of a sociological load in the chamber to break open the American sternum.
Cliff’s cardiological gig flatlines when his buyers catch wind of his involvement in a scam at a previous job which resulted in the suicide of an accomplice. Unable to find more work, he falls back in with running buddy Ricky (Kit Harington, sporting a fearsome handlebar ’tache), who recruits him for the local cocaine racket. Read the exacting T&C with his face pressed to a table by kingpin John (Josh Lucas) and chaperoned by one of his goons, Cliff is charged with running a few bricks of dope down the highway and returning with the cash.
In this snow-dusted purgatory, rendered with oppressive torpor by director Rod Blackhurst in the film’s opening stages, selling is the great American addiction and the cure. “Selling the possibility of a death that may never come is a hard sell,” adjudicates Ricky on the defibrillators (and that’s not a bad definition of noir’s existential leanings either). Their trade is fundamentally rooted in lying, reckons this fundamentally corrupt loose cannon. But Cliff believes selling propagates hope; which is how he justifies breaking bad while his wife (Nora Zehetner), with whom he has lost a child, is none the wiser about his movements.
With the pair holed up for the endgame in an empty property development – the symbolic redoubt of American hopes – Blackhurst doesn’t succeed in closing out his state of the nation diagnosis in a form any more substantial than old-school gunplay. But there are intuitive flashes of a cynical worldview in his crisp image-making (like the initial shot of a blood-splattered family portrait), and hard-bitten dialogue delivered by the admirably jaded McNairy. His gaunt fizzog increasingly has something of the American gothic painting about it; a fine fit for this chancy sortie out on the country’s financial frontier.
