Slamdance ’18: Rock Steady Row

It is like The Road Warrior, but with bikes and paddles. The good news is if you survive four years and keep your grades up, you will leave Rock Steady University with a college degree, but that is a big “if.” The key to survival owning a bike. That allows you to have a puncher’s chance of pedaling through the crime-infested campus unmolested. As usual, this new Freshman has his bike stolen on his first day, but he is more resourceful than the typical victims in Trevor Stevens’ Rock Steady Row, which screens as part of this year’s Slamdance Film Festival in Park City.

As the leader of the Kappa Brutus Omega frat, stealing bikes is Andrew Palmer’s thing. The Kappas control the bike trade on-campus, thanks to their regular kickbacks to the corrupt Dean of students. Their only rivals are The High Society, an upper-crust house led by the elitist Augustus Washington III.

Like Yojimbo, the Freshman will try to play the frats off each other, in hopes of breaking their hold on power and recovering his bike. He really liked that bike. Fortunately, his roommate Piper (Rock Steady is extremely coed) is an aspiring campus journalist, who can give him insight into how the crooked system works. She also has some embarrassing history with Palmer.

It is impossible to easily convey the tone of RSR. It is not really retro in the style of The Turbo Kid, despite all the Huffys and the Freshman’s mysterious old school Walkman. Nor is it a horror film, like Motorrad, but together those three films would be quite a bike-centric triple feature. It is nowhere near as mean-spirited as Hobo with a Shotgun either, but the world of Rock Steady functions in a very similar manner, with respect to logic and the causal acceptance of violence.

It is similarly tricky to pin down the Freshman. He is not exactly a hardnose or a slacker or sad sack or a sociopathic drifter, but he has elements of them all. Whatever that note is, Heston Horwin manages to hit it. Diamond White is terrific as the reasonably proactive Piper, while Logan Huffman is appropriately Skeet Ulrich-esque as the oily, psychotic Palmer. Plus, Isaac Alisma and the great Larry Miller really ham it up as Washington and the Dean, respectively.

I don’t know about you, but right now, I’m glad I went to a Lutheran school. There are no safe spaces at Rock Steady, that’s for sure, but it is what we’ve been asking for, by putting the barbarians in charge of higher education. Regardless, you won’t find any ideologically tinged satire in RSR. It is all about chaos, anarchy, and bikes. Despite their gleeful mania, Stevens and screenwriter Bomani Story create a weirdly self-contained and dramatically functional world. Enthusiastically recommended for cult movie fans, Rock Steady Row screens again this Monday (1/22), as part of the 2018 Slamdance Film Festival.

HairBrained: Beat Harvard

Haven’t we all been waiting for the definitive College Bowl movie? They call it Collegiate Mastermind here, but it is the same idea. However, viewers should be prepared to grade on a very generous curve when Billy Kent’s HairBrained (trailer here) opens tomorrow in New York.

Fourteen year-old Eli Pettifog might be a child prodigy, but will have to settle for Whitman College, a small east coast liberal arts school of modest reputation, instead of his dream school: Harvard. Perhaps not unreasonably, he finds himself rooming with Leo Searly, a forty-something (at least) compulsive gambler amidst a mid life crisis. Of course, this only heightens his sense of social isolation. Naturally, the dumbest of the jocks picks on him mercilessly, because his Yahoo Serious hair is simply a magnet for bullying.

Yet, Pettifog starts to make a place for himself when he takes over Whitman’s Collegiate Mastermind team. Powered by Pettifog’s brain, they start crushing their Ivy League competition. Soon the Whitman Warring Hares attract mighty Harvard’s attention—in a bad way.

HairBrained might not be the most original film, but the villains are from Harvard, so it has that going for it. Pettifog’s hair and his Dickensian name are about the only things in the film that are not lightweight. Still, Julia Garner is quite winning as Shauna, the townie prodigy, whom Pettifog takes a shine to. Greta Lee (recognizable to hipsters from her work on Girls) has some moments as well as Pettifog’s teammate, Gertrude. It is also hard to fault Brendan Fraser, who labors like a rented mule trying to make man-child Searly likable.

The problem is Pettifog is just sort of boring, which is obviously a big one considering how much of him there is in HairBrained. Frankly, Real Genius covered similar territory in the 80’s, but with considerably more wit and edge.  Nonetheless, there is a real tonal issue with respects to Pettifog’s mom (a criminally wasted Parker Posey), who is presented within the film as a lovably boozy trollop, but in real life would probably warrant a social services investigation.

There is not much to say after watching HairBrained, except “eh.” To his credit, Kent keeps it moving along at a reasonably healthy pace. It is mostly harmless and professional, but not a lot more. Earning a shrug more than anything else, HairBrained opens tomorrow (2/28) in New York at the Quad Cinema.