A father’s legacy is in dispute when wayward son RJ Mitte decides to spar with the barman who guards the man’s ashes
Several men walk into several bars in this interlocking suite of tales, and the repeating permutations of barman and barfly, blue collar and white collar, father and son, raconteur and listener pile up pleasingly into a kind of oppressive, Coenesque cosmic joke. RJ Mitte, Breaking Bad’s Walter White Jr, plays college boy Steve, who turns up in a snowstorm at a bar owned by the irascible Paul (Peter Outerbridge). He owes the latter money – and without it, Paul won’t give up the ashes of Steve’s recently deceased dad, Gord, whose funeral the youth failed to attend. And then this arrogant sadsack – whose very presence aggravates Paul – offers to pay him with a story.
Steve’s yarn is a slack spin on his own: a freezing wayfarer walks into The Oak Room, a pub in a neighbouring town, and puts a set of demands to an irked barman. Unimpressed, Paul tells him that he must learn to “goose the truth” to hold an audience, and then sucker-punches him with a story about Gord, with another story inside. Or he thinks it’s a sucker-punch – Steve reveals that he had only told the ending of his, and the start will transform everything.
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