Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets

MOVIE #1,912 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 08.20.24 This is really an amazing movie because it delivers upon its (very) high concept: what you are watching is not a documentary of a Las Vegas dive bar’s final night before closing its doors for good. In fact: In November 2016, Bill and Turner Ross rented a bar in New Orleans called Roaring 20’s. Use of the location cost them the majority of their $10,000 budget. The day after Donald Trump was elected, they told the 22 people that they’d cast for the project to show up at the bar. These people were not actors. They were people the filmmakers had met at other bars, people who had relationships with alcohol … And when these people arrived at the filming location, where they’d all spend just one day, they were given this direction: Pretend the bar is closing at the end of the night … Over the course of the day, the Rosses — the only two camera operators inside the bar — gave little other instruction. They filmed as their cast, who had never met one another prior, laughed, cried, flirted, slept and got very, very drunk.

But the documentary filmmakers present this as reality and — I’ll risk outing myself as an idiot here — I bought it hook, line and sinker. I went into this completely cold and I never once thought what I was seeing on-screen wasn’t ‘real’. (In my defense, I had just watched the Ross Brothers’ previous four films, all concretely in the documentary genre.)

The success of this film is either a true ‘happy accident’ miracle (the wrong batch of participants and this goes south fast), or a testament to the destructive magic of alcohol. I’ve given up the drink, personally, but it’s hard to argue it doesn’t level the playing field in a sense. With total inebriation, the loss of inhibitions renders the subjects (why does it feel wrong to call them actors?) somewhere apart from good and bad — in vino veritas, or thereabouts. If you’ve ever made an instant friend late-night at some pub then you know that this is possible: the connection IS real. They just happened to have cameras rolling.

That this screened as a documentary in festival settings and is labeled as such wherever it's available further clouds how we’re meant to interpret the film. There is the lie — this was shot in a rented bar in New Orleans not Las Vegas — and then there is the truth — these are real humans, getting (really) drunk. While the lie seems bigger in retrospect, it really isn’t in practice. For the 90 minutes you spend with the film, that’s mostly immaterial. Maybe you’ll be pissed off that they ‘tricked you’ but it’s a harmless jab at worst, and — if you can get past it (which you should) — you’ll find this reveal to be an extended part of the experience. I think of a world where I simply watched this at face value and never googled it after the fact. There are people out there who will go to their grave thinking that this bar in Las Vegas closed in 2016 and these were its sad and funny regulars.

But like any movie worth its salt — doc or fiction — it’s about the universal truths. There are sad and funny regulars at dive bars everywhere in America. And this is as good an homage to these folks as I’ve ever seen.

There’s some direct, if not inverse parallels to their most recent film, Gasoline Rainbow (a movie presented as fiction that feels like a documentary). I definitely have some more/different thoughts on that (the first Ross Brothers’ picture I watched) after seeing this, so check out that review.

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Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is an American documentary film by the Ross brothers that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. It was released on January 24, 2020.