Drunk Bus is a film about a young conflicted man named Michael played by Charlie Tahan, best known as Wyatt Langmore from the Netflix series Ozark, who despite having graduated from college still lives in the same small town driving the night bus, which is affectionately known as the “drunk bus”. Michael is stuck in a rut, he dated the same girl from high school all through college and upon graduation she decided to move to New York, while Michael stayed in small town Kent. Instead of moving on with his life, he got a job driving a bus that loops around the campus and surrounding neighbourhood, over and over again. The job is so tedious he experiences a Groundhog Day like lifestyle, knowing exactly when a woman will be picking up her dogs excrement, knowing when Christmas lights will turn off due to a timer and even when a train will blast its horn. There is no need to make any life choices when you just need to go in circles and doing something as insignificant as getting on the highway will cost you your job.
This film was originally scheduled to come out and have its world premiere at SXSW 2020, but that was one of the first main events to have been cancelled. It was shot back in 2019, but the story seems to have originated from 2015 and it is set in 2006. I provide all these dates to give a timeline, other than likely being written back in 2006, this movie doesn’t offer much in the way of needing to be set then. As someone who was finishing high school during this time period, I’m very familiar with Guitar Hero, double popped collars and Motorola Razor’s being the coolest phone on the market. It was the origin of the hipster era and a weird mish-mash of styles and cultures as older millennials were coming into their own.
This film felt like it would have been a perfect vehicle (no pun intended) for someone like Michael Cera, who in the late 2000’s was starring in films like Superbad, Juno, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Scott Pilgrim vs The World. You could easily believe that the character Michael was named after Cera, as he certainly has the same awkward charm to his sensibilities, and Kat as played by Kara Hayward (Suzie from Moonrise Kingdom) seems to have the right amount of sarcasm and alternative edge as Kat Dennings (Cera’s co-star in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), which seems like more than just a coincidence that she also shares a name.
The film features plenty of mild gross out humour, in the opening sequence showing Michael on his bus route, a pretty, but very intoxicated young woman complains about her stomach hurting and when handed a barf bag, instead of puking she defecates all over the bus. Later double popped collar bro does a long and extended burp into Michael’s face and finishes it off by blowing the stench into him. The film also has a curious vocabulary, where one of the side characters is revealed to be the gay and on a phone call with his parents to come out, he is described affectionately as a “homo”, which isn’t exactly an acceptable descriptor in 2021 or 2015.
There are some highlights, one being a character known as Fuck You Bob, because anytime someone talked to them he would reply with a simple “Fuck you”. Every day Michael has to cajole Bob into getting on the bus, despite the fact that Bob uses his electric wheelchair to get around in the middle of the night in the freezing cold. He unfortunately passes away and when new information is revealed it is a turning point for Michael and allows him to see the world differently. Will Forte shows up as a disembodied voice, squawking orders and insults at Michael from the bus depot headquarters, making it a very easy paycheque for him.
The film has some charm and humour to it, but the very oddly period aspect of the film does more hindrance than assistance. The main characters aren’t exactly redeemable, and the biggest conflict seems to be surrounding Michael and not having lost his virginity, something clever in 2007’s Superbad, less so today. It tries so hard to be an accurate assessment of the era, it instead misses why those films worked and showed how cringey looking back at your youth with rose-tinted glasses can be.
Drunk Bus was seen during the 2021 Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival. Thank you to the festival for the press pass. Drunk Bus currently has no wide North American release date.
