A fine performance — and a good character — in search of a story. Silken-maned Robert Carlyle plays an aging former rocker, haunted by the death of his brother (his old band's frontman) and living in self-imposed exile on a farm in California. It's a tolerable, static, hidden sort of life, the kind that just begs for some small misstep to start the machinery that will bring everything to light and force a reckoning. The trouble is, the machinery takes over; our man is moved rather than moving, and the reckoning feels more like a shift in circumstance than any kind of victory. Still, despite a couple of flat attempts at pathos, the feeling is right: the crushing weight of the mundane on a man who flirted with greatness in the past and who must now make peace with the present. If you don't burn out, you fade away. (2012) — Matthew Lickona
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