Leonard Moore (Patrick Fabian) once heard Led Zeppelin as a child, and it changed his whole life. He became interested in music, began to collect records, and when he grew up, he opened his own record store with records, in which he enjoyed communicating with music fans like himself. At the same time, Leonard had a truly encyclopedic knowledge of music: various musical movements and trends, the history of groups, their discography, special albums, tours, and so on.
For twenty-five years, Leonard kept his store, but the music world is changing quite quickly, and with the advent of the era of all sorts of spotify and other music streaming services, music on media has simply become irrelevant. As a result, Leonard had to close the store, which was associated with most of his life.
Moore has a family: wife Don (Tanya Clark) and two charming daughters of five and seven years old. Don works, so Leonard has taken care of the daughters and the housework: they have their own separate house, which they bought when things were still going well. Leonard gets up early in the morning, cooks breakfast for the whole family, then cleans up, cooks lunch for the girls, then dinner for the whole family – in general, do not breathe.
Of course, Leonard also tried to look for work. He even went to an interview at the office of the very popular online music service Pop Fizz – Moore hoped they might be interested in his encyclopedic knowledge of music. However, the service is engaged in modern music, about which Leonard knows little, and no one needs his knowledge of the music of past generations: the users of the service are young people.
At some point, Don tells her husband that they need to pay property taxes – a large sum of $10,000 – and that they don’t have that kind of money. So either the house needs to be sold or Leonard needs to find a job, whatever. Moore comforts his wife by assuring him that he will be able to fetch a much larger sum from his vinyl and CD collection, which he has decided to sell.
However, it turned out that no one really needed this collection, and the dealer paid Leonard some miserable $ 850. After that, Moore had nowhere to go: he needed at least some work, and if possible, not at Starbucks or McDonald’s, and when he comes across an advertisement for DriverX, a taxi service that hires drivers with their own cars, – Leonard applies there. Now he will work as a taxi driver in a modern high-tech service.
***
Tiny independent studio Mark Stolaroff Productions, a little-known director Henry Barrial, who directed the film from his own script (he said that his own experience at Uber was reflected in this script), the money for the picture, as I understand it, was raised on Kickstarter. Two awards received in 2018 from the little-known film festivals Durango Film Festival and Woods Hole Film Festival and complete obscurity from the public (613 votes on IMDB – apparently, these are all those who supported the project on Kickstarter).
I was interested in this film as the lead actor: I really liked Patrick Fabian in the TV series Better Call Saul, where he played Howard Hamlin, the head of the legal department of Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill, in which Jimmy McGill’s brother Chuck worked and where he tried to get a job himself Jimmy.
“Driver X” is a rather simple film, from the series “about life”. A man at the age of fifty lost his job, did not find a new job to his liking, is in a certain crisis, has some problems in his relationship with his wife, and, out of hopelessness, is forced to go to taxi.
And working as a taxi driver is, you know, a very peculiar experience, because drivers have to deal with completely different people who can also be in a somewhat twilight state due to alcohol or drugs taken, and the experience of working in a music store is nothing to Leonard will not help: he himself will have to comprehend all the subtleties and complexities of such a profession. Actually, basically the film is dedicated to what kind of people and in what situations the main character has to face and how he gets out of all this.
We are also shown that although this job does not bring much money – Leonard will have to learn how to work more efficiently and earn more – his position in the family is clearly becoming more status and his relationship with his wife is slowly getting better.
It is quite interesting to watch what kind of passengers Moore has to deal with, among them there are peculiar characters. It will not do, of course, without a drunk girl and without a sexually reckless girl. Leonard will deliver a stern business man who has tied up an alcoholic and other people, among whom there will even be a completely reckless Ukrainian musical group. Yes, and Leonard will still have to get acquainted with modern music, because the passengers will want to listen to something of their own, not Led Zeppelin, they should listen, in fact.
I liked Patrick Fabian as Leonard. It seems nothing special, but the image turned out to be cute and in some ways even touching. And Moore in this film is nothing like the polished lawyer Howard Hamlin in Better Call Saul.
Also liked Tanya Clark, who played Don, Leonard’s wife. I had seen her before in a small role in the cool series “Banshee”. Here the role is also small, but attracting attention. Don was also very funny talking about her food troubles and all these idiotic “detoxes”.
Among the taxi passengers, there were also familiar actors: Oscar Nunez from The Office, the most colorful Iqbal Teba from the TV series On the Edge, The Black List, Two and a Half Men and the films School of Rock and Green Book.
There will be no sharp turns of events here: just, as I said, a kind of slice of life. But I was interested, and I did not regret that I looked at this picture. For some reason, she reminded me of the old film “Hell’s Taxi”, which is made in the same style and also tells about who and what the taxi driver has to deal with.
So, as a kind of disruption of the stereotype and as a break from the mainstream, this is it. An unremarkable movie, not a must-see at all, but you might like it and it leaves a good aftertaste.
And, as in the case of the film “Life Stopped”, this film will soon be available for legal viewing in the original with United States subtitles on my film channel, which we organize with one streaming service. The channel should start in the first decade of October, that is, very soon.
Driver-X / DriverX review
Directed by: Henry Barrial Cast: Patrick Fabian, Tanya Clark, Desmin Borges, Travis Schuldt, Melissa Fumero, Oscar Nunez, Nina Senicar, Iqbal Teba, Max Gale, Heather Ankeny
Drama, USA, 2017, 98 min.