Director: William H. Macy
Stars: Billy Crudup, Anton Yelchin, Miles Heizer, Laurence Fishburne, Selena Gomez, Felicity Huffman
Sam (Crudup) is the father of Josh (Heizer), a troubled young man who commits the tragic crime of shooting a number of students at his school before turning on himself. Sam falls apart and ends up living on a boat while drinking himself through the day. However, upon going through his son’s things he finds all the songs Josh wrote, and starts performing them at an open mic night. Through this he gets catharsis, but when he forms a band the songs take on a life of their own, and he wonders how far he can go before he tells his band the truth about who wrote them.
At first this plot sounds a little like The World’s Greatest Dad, in which a father writes his son’s diary and gets famous because of it. But in this one Sam never seeks fame, it’s simply a way for him to work his way through the pain of his son’s death. The issues presented in Rudderless are moving. Firstly there’s the complex feelings that Sam goes through of knowing that his son is a murderer, and how to correlate that with the boy he raised. I can’t imagine the strength needed to deal with that, and Crudup does brilliantly in showing the spectrum of emotions.
Then there’s the debate about artistic merit, and how much the artist should influence the work. Should you like a song if a murderer wrote it? Should it be dismissed simply because of who wrote it? They’re interesting questions that spark much discussion. The tension here comes with his band, mainly the character played by Anton Yelchin, who becomes a surrogate son to Sam. There are some moving exchanges and the emotional beats hit hard.
The songs are really good too, and this film features the best rendition of ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ that I’ve ever heard. This is a musical that’s in the same vein as Once or Forget Me Not, and they’re my favorite types of musicals. It’s a genuinely moving film with heaps of drama, some light moments, and plenty of material for thought and discussion afterwards.