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Thunder Road

Thunder Road

When it played the festival circuit in 2016 (winning Jury prizes at Sundance and practically everywhere else), Jim Cummings' 13-minute short Thunder Road was hard to forget — a deeply strange, yet funny, knot of grief and apology built around a heartbreakingly awkward dance-and-lip-sync performance of Bruce Springsteen's song. Conceived as one continuous shot among mourners at a funeral, it was perfectly complete despite raising many questions about the lives lived outside that room — especially the life of the policeman (Cummings) delivering that lip-sync tribute to his dead mother.

Back now with a weird and moving feature adaptation, Cummings follows that cop out into the rest of his life, where this is not the only kind of loss he's trying, unsuccessfully, to cope with. Driven by Cummings' transfixingly vulnerable performance, the movie not only justifies returning to the source: Shockingly, it does so without even using the device that seemed key to the short's success.

The movie has [plenty of] gut-punches in store for Jim, pushing him toward an abrupt identification with the speaker in the Springsteen song that haunts him. Abandoned by those who should care, desperate to escape, he begs an apprehensive girl to believe in him just enough to let him drive them toward something better.

— John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter

Thunder Road

Sun September 23, 2018, 7:30 PM, Muenzinger Auditorium

USA, 2018, in English, Color, 92 min

Director: Jim Cummings, Writer: Jim Cummings, Cast: Jim Cummings, Kendal Farr, Nican Robinson, Jocelyn DeBoer, Macon Blair

recommend

Tickets

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$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
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Parking

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Established 1941 by James Sandoe.

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(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.

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(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil Grillo.

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Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.

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Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.

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