Everyone around Michael has their own briefly-sketched woes and joys, from bartender Shay—who is trying to do right by her just-starting-to-act-out teenage son—to a faded hippie flirt whose transient backstory suggests that there is some deep existential restlessness lying under his smooth, affable charm. It’s amazing what the Rosses were able to get from their cast in one marathon 18-hour filming session. The film is teeming with personal detail without ever veering into canned, plodding exposition. Bloody Noses, Empty Pockets vividly captures life in all its discursive grain, compassionately setting a stage for people with little, if any, representation in Hollywood to share their experiences—with each other and with whatever audience this small, curious movie finds. Seen from that angle, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets seems vital and nourishing, a true exemplar of cinema’s ability to shine light on the infinite variety of life in the world.
But step back and consider the film more, and something almost insidious starts to taint the picture. The Rosses are documentarians, a career label that gives Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets a certain imprimatur: this is real, the movie’s profile suggests. The film was received rapturously at Sundance and has been getting rave reviews in the lead-up to its release. And yet, the movie isn’t, in some crucial senses, actually real. In one interview, provided to critics in press notes, Bill Ross says the following about the difficulty of casting and scouting locations for the film: “Either the bar aesthetically looked correct and the people inside it weren’t, or you’d find a bar where maybe a couple of people worked, but the bar wasn’t right.”
Something about that sentiment doesn’t sit right. I’m left wondering what the Rosses’ view of a “correct” person was, what made certain people work and others not. If one is going to embark upon a project that shows people in all their true, lived-in, articulated being, how curatorial can that project be? And what does a Sundance audience, or a New York City-dwelling critic for a glossy magazine, bring to that project in terms of expectation? I wonder if I came to Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets hoping to see the same thing that the Rosses were looking for when scouring bars trying to find the correct people for their film—a certain pleasing grittiness, a certain ragged grace amid the ruins.
Once people were found to fit the film’s prepackaged vision, the Rosses then set those people loose on a bender in a controlled, and very much created, environment. Responsibly, I’m sure. But there is still something ickily experimental, almost zoological, about the construction of this film—as I understand it to be, anyway. The line between ennoblement and exploitation can be very thin, and I’m ultimately not sure what side Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets lands on.
Then again, wringing my hands about how much true agency the cast of this film had is its own kind of condescension. It’s probably best to trust that Martin and the rest of the real people playing fake denizens of the Roaring 20s had full command of what they were doing, how they were being portrayed, and what the film was saying about them. Operating from that place of trust, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a fascinating film, one that people should seek out even if only to inspect it and try to figure out what exactly it’s doing, in a way I still cannot.
Its moral identity aside, this is a staggering piece of filmmaking. The Rosses have a keen command of picture and motion; their film is riveting from the jump, swiftly and totally enveloping us in the bonhomie of Michael and his bleary company. Maybe the non-reality of it all isn’t worth fretting about. Like the best drama, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets has an undeniable emotional and intellectual resonance—which is maybe the only truth that matters.
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