An aging trucker, a Texas screenwriter and a New Orleans band director lead a week of American films built on work, music and the miles between places.
The strongest American films this week share a subject: people whose lives are measured in miles and years of work.
The Long Haul, which screened at the Austin Film Festival on October 31 after its Tribeca premiere, gives that subject a face. Margo Martindale plays CJ Montague, a long-haul driver in Idaho whose decades on the road are ending as the trucking industry changes around her. A letter from a parole board reopens a loss from twenty-five years earlier, and director David Drake builds the film around the cab of her truck, the one place her independence has always lived. Cole Sprouse, Stephen Root and Wes Studi join her in a 91-minute drama shot in New Mexico.
In Austin again, A Man of Vision turns to the writer who taught a generation how to see the West. Elizabeth Mims's documentary on Bill Wittliff premieres on November 1. Wittliff adapted Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove for television, wrote The Black Stallion, and worked alongside Willie Nelson on Honeysuckle Rose and Red Headed Stranger, all while staying rooted in Texas. The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University now hold that legacy.
Music carries the Louisiana stories. Occupational Hazard: The First Coral Reefers reached digital platforms on October 30, with Jeff Bridges narrating the story of Jimmy Buffett's original band in 1970s Key West, where country songwriting, Gulf Coast storytelling and Caribbean weather first mixed into a sound of their own. In New Orleans, King of the Chitlin Circuit follows Bobby Rush at 92, still working the roads he started on in rural Louisiana, while Jackson Fager's Maestro watches band director Wilbert Rawlins Jr. hold together the L.B. Landry High School marching band, a New Orleans institution in uniform, with a new song from Jon Batiste.
The week's Western is a standoff with the guns removed. The Stalemate, which premiered in Austin on October 30, strands Ben Foster's sheriff and Manny Jacinto's robber in open country after both men run out of bullets, leaving negotiation to do the work gunfire usually does.
Around them, the road keeps moving: two estranged brothers cross the California desert toward the Salton Sea in Love-Love, an aspiring writer drives a literary celebrity to Telluride in Welcome to the Fishbowl, and Malibu neighbors reckon with wildfire in Big Rock Burning. Taken together, the week argues that American identity is still written at working speed, on highways, in band rooms and along the old touring circuits.