Reteaming with his Blue Valentine director, Derek Ciafrance, Ryan Gosling plays Luke, a motorcycle dare-devil… a nowhere man who has a one night stand with (Ro) Eva Mendez. But when he finds out he has a son… Luke wants to make good on his life. But first, he’ll have to do something bad…rob a bank. It’s an unusual thing when a filmmaker can get an audience to root for a hero doing something unethical (think Bugsy or Tony Soprano) but no sooner Luke wins us over, the story derails into an unlikeable character in an unlikeable premise. That is until…
Enter Avery, Bradley Cooper on the other side of the law, a cop who by pure accident sabotages any hope of Luke raising his infant son. But Cooper’s character is a father of a son, too; same age as Luke’s. The film becomes twisted politics when Ray Liotta appears as a crooked cop, though this story isn’t about the law or good versus bad, it’s truly a tale that weaves fathers and sons through two generations.
Like he did in Drive, Gosling is such a good actor he contains his emotions without movement or a word, just in his facial expressions alone. And while a lot of the audience’s emotions are invested in Gosling’s performance, the overdrawn-out-story is not enough to sustain his intensity. Cooper too is excellent, and has shown us in Silver Lining’s Playbook that he’s beyond just the stud in the bachelor role of The Hangover.
At every crossroad in the two men’s lives we see obsession and conscience which eventually deliver a terrible collision.
Twenty minutes too long (spoiler alert) it should have ended at the scene with the grown Jason on his bicycle riding off down the wooded road in his father’s sunglasses. We knew then what was to come as history undoubtedly repeats itself. And it would have sustained a higher elegance at that cliff-hanger ending. We just didn’t need to sit through yet another stressful twenty minutes of the predictable and the inevitable. Three tiaras