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Review

Mark Borchardt is a 30ish man from Menominee Falls, where every T-shirt tells a story. He tells documentarian Smith that it's no longer time to drink and dream, but to create and complete. His planned tribute to his hometown, Northwestern, has been in preproduction for six years, lacking a script, a cast and funding. This spiritual heir to Herschell Gordon Lewis sometimes works on the script in his car at the airport parking lot to avoid distractions (the mother of his three children, whom he doesn't want to marry; the expectations of his parents, whom he lives with; and letter after letter demanding payment now). Whatever his failings, Mark is a trooper: scrabbling against a sea of mediocrity and despair, attempting to raise money from suspicious relatives, with grandiose plans in various nascent stages of actualization. Director Smith wisely lets Borchardt do the talking, constructing his life scene after scene. It never seems to occur to him that the documentarians are making their film while he's talking about his. In fact, everyone seems to accept the cameras with the same insouciance as the Bouviers in Grey Gardens. Smith has delivered a riveting glimpse into an R. Crumb world of muddled thinking, ill-formed beliefs and thwarted endeavors.

 -- Ann Yarabinee