This is a Carousel guest review by Matt Pegas. Yes, we already reviewed this movie. Our feeling is, we’re only going to review good movies until they stop making bad ones, even if it means reviewing the same good one over and over again.
The idea of making a "real movie" has long been a holy grail in the online right. More recently, with the influx of cash and talent represented by the outputs of Alex Moyer, Amanda Milius, Peter Vack and others—not to mention the recent funding of a Delicious Tacos Short film to be directed by Asher Penn—this goal has suddenly begun to appear decidedly attainable.
But what do we mean by real movie? A proper budget? A wide theatrical release? Something that changes the culture by becoming “part of the conversation”? The former two things hardly guarantee the latter, as filmmakers behind Bros, Amsterdam, and Babylon learned the hard way last year, while outsider titles like Terrifier 2 found their way to relevance on microscopic budgets and word of mouth. Indeed, we live in the best and worst of times for the art of moviemaking, with the role of the movie in the culture decidedly waning, at the same time that anyone with an iPhone has gained the ability to shoot and edit something screenable.
I offer this little deconstruction as a prelude to look at a title which doesn’t quite cross the threshold of what most what consider a “real movie” but which is worthy of far more attention than it received.
Bolt Driver (2021, directed by Nick Corirossi and Van Alpert, starring Corirossi) was shot entirely on an iPhone in Los Angeles from 2016-2020, on little to no budget. At 42 minutes it is technically a short film but packs the punch of a proper feature (it can be viewed for free in its entirety here). I can’t speak to the politics of its creators, but Bolt Driver delves into occulted aspects of the internet, masculinity, and Trump in a forthright way that I think put it squarely in the camp of “anti-woke” cinema.
The film follows a troubled young Bolt driver named Travis, living alone in Los Angeles and servicing the streets behind the wheel of his car turned ride-share vehicle, picking up “zoomers, doomers, boomers, groomers” and everyone in between. Travis racks up bad reviews thanks to his poor navigation skills and committing of autistic faux pas. He pines after women on Instagram and OnlyFans in his spare time, tells us he’s been to every Hooters, and spends his tip money on a VIP pass to exotica expo.
We meet him first in the summer of 2016, and he becomes an unlikely Trump supporter after dropping a gorgeous young volunteer at the Trump campaign’s LA headquarters. Anyone who can garner support from such an attractive woman must have something going for him, Travis concludes, but his fixation on Trump outlives his infatuation with the girl.
After some sketchy encounters with riders, Travis gets himself “a piece” for self-protection and takes to target practice with gusto. He tells us that he sometimes feels like a Batman and fantasizes about one day rescuing OnlyFans girls from their douchebag boyfriends.
I’ll chock it up to the significant cultural differences between the 1970’s and 2010’s—including but not limited to the difference in significance between today’s gig-drivers and the proper taxi drivers of yesteryear—that it wasn’t until the film’s last ten minutes that it clicked into place for me just how obvious and direct of an homage Bolt Driver was to Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese’s analogously titled movie from 1976. Right down to having a protagonist named Travis.
Maybe I was just so sucked in by the audio-visuals and editing, which in every way live up to the junk and sensory overload of our current era. Everything we see is mediated through layers of lurid Snapchat filters and constant commercial and pop-cultural references. “I guess I do believe we’re in the Matrix”, Travis tells us as the film opens “because sometimes I just look around and I feel like I’m in a video game”. And who could blame him?
Travis tells us he’s not an incel because he could have sex if he really wanted. This is likely meant as a comedic moment of the protagonist protesting too much, but I sort of believe him. To write off the Taxi Driver narrative as the “incel” narrative is, I think, reductive. I prefer to think of it more generally as “the Paul Schrader narrative” since it applies just as well to protagonists who can’t get laid as to men who could and maybe even are getting laid, but who nevertheless are guided by their sexual frustration and loneliness toward a deeper dissatisfaction with the world. A dissatisfaction which ultimately leads them toward drastic, violent action against a perceived evil.
This applies just as well to Willem Dafoe in Light Sleeper, as to Ethan Hawke in First Reformed, as to Ken Ogata’s Yukio Mishima, as to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle. Certainly, it also applies Bolt Driver’s Travis who waxes spiritual in his final post, telling his followers that the “love [he] gives off in the simulation has only been magically transformed into a force of evil against [him]” and that “big moves” have to be made. That Travis’s actions are ultimately less sympathetic than any of Schrader’s heroes’ may be a weakness of Bolt Driver, but it’s clear, after consideration, that the movie couldn’t have ended in any other way.
How many other movies could have been made like Bolt Driver if those of us attuned to the meaning in our loneliness had captured our humdrum lives just a little bit more on our iPhones? I suspect quite a few, though it’s doubtful many would be as deftly edited and gripping as Bolt Driver.
In conclusion, 5 Stars would ride again.