Movie Nation

Somewhere early on in Bruce Springsteen’s latest “gather musicians in my barn to cut a record” documentary, “Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You,” the big question he invites us to ask of him becomes clear.

What becomes the pop star in winter?

Not just literal winter, of the “Hey guys, it’s SNOWING” exclamation from The Boss as “Jersey weather” Jersey winter sets in around them on his farm, in his recording studio barn in his beloved New Jersey.

Do you go on the road and stay there, like Willie and Dylan? Do you try your hand at other forms of writing, or keep composing songs for a shrinking fanbase? Have you worn out your ability to reinvent yourself, or do you keep looking for new frontiers?

Springsteen may have run through every single one of those options. And yet he remains the consummate artist who “must be heard.” In the words of the fiction writer Harlan Ellison, “I have no mouth and I must scream.”

As Springsteen, reciting from his poetic/quasi-pretentious liner-notes-run-amok narration, sets up each song in the set — reflecting on this friend from his first band (The Castilles) passing, on others he’s lost, on “the debt I still owe my Freehold (NJ) brothers-in-arms,” on how “pop was always a raucous meditation,” his “45 year long conversation” with The E-Street Band, both a finely tuned motor and an outfit that can still “float like a butterfly, and sting like a bee” — you can’t help but wonder if there’s a better venue for this conversation, this “letter.”

Sure, he’s proven all he ever needs to prove, and then some, on the road. He’s dominated Broadway. Sold millions of records in his day. But this film and his last one, a doc about a C&W bend in the road on his musical journey (“Under Western Stars”) feels stiff, stale, self-serving and self-conscious.

Of course it’s in black and white. But at least he’s not wearing an ill-suited cowboy hat.

The songs are a pleasantly-forgettable collection in the usual Springsteen keys and time signatures and sound awfully similar to earlier works in his restless Jersey soul canon.

He and the band are doing what they love to do, in a low-impact/less-effort “comforts of home” way. It’s “not a job, it is a calling” he narrates, “a vocation.” But in the arid air of a recording studio the music loses its life, the “conversation” with the audience is absent and the “letter” really does feel like a letter — a little over-familiar, a bit long-winded.

“I took all the sunshine and pain,” he sings, rhyming it with “happiness and pain,” stretching the Big Noun in the title tune an extra syllable or two, as he is wont to do.

“I sent it in my Le-HE-ter to you.”

He preaches from Book of Pop Revelations, “life in 180 seconds or less,” and sings “As Ben E. King’s (“Stand by Me”) fills the air, baby that’s the power of prayer.”

There’s a little interplay with the band, a few “notes” after this or that take of the tunes.

“Roy (Bittan) don’t play it up higher, just don’t play it so LOW.”

But there’s a lot more narration than banter. Ho. Hum.

The idea of anybody staying friends with people you’ve worked with half a century is a miracle. And we all get old, reflective and sentimental, Sundance. No shame or dishonor in that.

“We’re taking this thing til we’re all in the box,” is Springsteen’s toast as they wrap things up. An artist’s compulsion to keep making art is to be revered.

But if you’re known for being the world’s greatest live act, maybe that’s how you present your new songs to the faithful (he had a hand-picked “audience” for “Under Western Stars,” in the barn) — in a roadhouse, drinks clinking and conversation murmuring, hoots or muted applause road-testing every single song, a “narration” that’s more improvised and less self-conscious.

He’s not the head-case Dylan became, not the sell-out Jimmy Buffett perfected, not an oldies act like every contemporary that doesn’t fit those first two comparisons.

Is there no one in his time-tested circle who can tell him, “Yeah, let’s get the band back together, but go out among THE PEOPLE when we do?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, alcohol

Cast: Bruce Springsteen, Little Steven Van Zandt, Roy Bittan, Max Weinberg, Nils Lofgren, Patti Scialfa, Jake Clemons, Garry Tallent.

Credits: Thom Zimny, script.narration by Bruce Springsteen. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:26

The Golden Globe-winning 1972 documentary “I Am a Dancer” is a straightforward, old-fashioned “dancer and the dance” film, very much a product of its time. It’s heavy on sweaty rehearsals but dominated by performance sequences from “Sleeping Beauty,” “La Dame aux Camélia” and “La Sylphide.”

But its value beyond being an artifact of its era is that it preserves the dancer who is its focus, the Russian ex-pat Rudolf Nureyev, forever on film at his glorious peak.

He’d been celebrated for over a decade when Pierre Jourdan brought his (much bulkier than today) camera into rehearsal studios and close to the stage for classic performances.

Nureyev’s liberating defection from the Soviet Empire in 1961 had created a sensation beyond his fame within the performing arts. Jourdan’s film, by no means an “intimate” portrait, has the 33 year-old dancer shrugging that “I live in suitcase. My only ground is my work.”

And that’s what Jourdan captures with his camera, the sweat of being at the barre with the entire corps de ballet, intensely focused, putting in the way as a French class-leader hums “Da da du…Arabesque…dum dum dum Pas de deux.”

Dame Margot Fonteyn, the British ballerina, already a legend when Nureyev pursued her as a partner, marvels at how well they meshed on stage, this “boy, half my age” with all his grace and athleticism.

The film’s dated and superficial treatment of its handsome, mop-topped subject may seem at arm’s length by modern standards. But gay dancers didn’t speak of their sexuality in the early ’70s.

Jourdan instead lets the performances take over the film. Still, there’s this glorious sequence where the star, who evolved into a choreographer, director and even conductor before his career and life were cut short by AIDS, shows his corps exactly what he wants.

He’s in street clothes and boots, and he swoops right in with all the ballerinas, boots thundering at every landing, teaching them the precise gesture, pose and position he desires.

MPAA Rating: unrated, smoking

Cast: Rudolf Nureyev, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Glen Tetley, narrated by Bryan Forbes

Credits: Written and directed by Pierre Jourdan. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:32

A father bounces his child of three on his lap in bed.

In his mind’s eye, he has a different haircut, is fur clad like a Norseman of old, rowing the blond child to a rocky, Dark Ages shore.

It’s a fantasy world of their own creation, a quest he and the child are making up as they go along — him providing the muscle, the kid, babbling and inventing in Aussie-accented English, naming things, interacting with a fairy and learning the rules.

“If we see goblins?”

“We KILL’em!”

It takes a while to determine the beautiful, long-haired child is a boy, that his name is Bodhi.

We meet his mother at about the time we notice that some of Dad’s story game play is happening in a hospital bed.

Father and son are weaving a long-form fantasy around that which we don’t speak about, or that which few of us are comfortable talking about with our children — death.

“But I don’t LIKE games about being dead!”

Writer, director and star Mark Webber has been in films since the late ’90s (“Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,””Laggies,” “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot”). When he writes and directs his own work (“Flesh and Blood”), he tends to tell stories about family WITH family.

“The Place of No Words” has Webber and wife Teresa Palmer (“Lights Out,” “Hacksaw Ridge,” “Point Break”) playing a married couple entertaining and trying to figure out a way to explain “Daddy’s sick” to their little boy, Bodhi Palmer.

It’s a somber, reflective and magically set fantasy in the vein of “Where the Wild Things Are,” with symbolic monsters to be faced and bested, befriended or at least accepted. But the real magic of the story might be the utterly natural way this family acts like a family, with a precocious, unaffected and engaging child the glue that holds it all together.

They filmed this indie jewel in Wales in between seasons of Mom’s SkyTV series, “A Discovery of Witches.”

Mom looks haunted, gaunt at times. “It’s been so heavy around here,” she confides to a friend. But she’s got to keep up bubbly appearances even as her husband Mark has reached “a place of acceptance.”

The film has literary allusions and a visual tone that beautifully matches an overcast “real” world with the rocky hills and mountains and moss-covered trees of father-and-son’s place of escape.

It’s not a deep treatment of a serious subject. But it is an affecting one, made more so by the players groping and grasping at emotions that strike a balance between parental sheltering of a child, protecting him from ugly reality, and the need to gently remove that shelter at just the right moment.

You have to be in the mood for it, but “The Place of No Words” is a touching, sweet and intimate fantasy unlike most any film you’ve seen, save for its much more expensive and less moving antecedent, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, some fantasy violence

Cast: Mark Webber, Bodhi Palmer, Teresa Palmer

Credits: Written and directed by Mark Webber. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:35

This indie drama has been a great favorite at film festivals, and it’s headed to theaters/streaming in early Nov.

The gags aim lower and the pranks seem more labored. The effort shows, as does the scripted fakery.

It’s harder for Sacha Baron Cohen to go anywhere looking like “stupid reporter” from Kazakhstan. Everyone, save for elderly Republicans and rural rubes, recognizes him.

Perhaps Sacha Baron Cohen and his “Borat,” “Bruno” and “Dictator” muse Larry Charles had run their course together. But “Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm” shows that Charles’ replacements — director Jason Woliner and seven credited writers (aside from Cohen) — aren’t a substitute for the furiously funny foil Cohen used to have around to bounce ideas off of.

And yes, the Rudy Giuliani sting is icky and funny, and is being somewhat oversold.

But “Subsequent Moviefilm,” coming fourteen years after “Borat,” still manages to find a few big, cringe-worthy laughs among America’s bigots and brainwashed Trumpists. Cohen is still able to hold up a mirror on country music/”Dog: The Bounty Hunter”/One America News nation and let us see how hilariously stupid and venal we can be.

The set-up — Borat (Cohen) gets out of prison after being locked up for years for “bringing shame to Kazakhstan.” The premier wants him to travel to America with a gift to bribe Trump, friend to the rest of the world’s “strong men” dictators.

It doesn’t go well. But at least he’s brought the daughter (Maria Bakalova) he never realized he had along for the journey. Well, she stowed away. And she “ate” the intended bribe-gift. But maybe Trump, or Mike Pence, will accept the 15 year-old as a gift, instead.

There are many gags about the value of women “where I come from,” and Borat’s and daughter Turat’s discovery that in America, women can drive cars and speak their minds.

A makeover is in order, suggested by an “Internet influencer” and “sugar baby.”

A debutante “consultant” is consulted, and a Macon, Georgia father-daughter cotillion is disrupted.

A bakery “accident” leads to the ingestion of a plastic decoration that only a “women’s counseling clinic” (Fundamentalists pretending to be an ob-gyn practice where women can obtain a legal abortion).

A Pence speech at CPAC is disrupted, as is a Republican Women meeting.

And then, there’s the COVID quarantine Borat talks a couple of fiftyish, Deep South and deep-down-the-rabbit-hole Fox News cultists/gun nuts/conspiracy loons into letting him share.

By the time Giuliani shows up, declaring in an interview with the 15 year-old Turat that “The Chinese manufactured the virus and spread it around the world,” Borat and daughter have traced the misinformation from the dunces who believe it to the frauds who feed it to them.

The film’s sentimental streak comes from the father learning his daughter is “human being,” and from having to give up Kazakhstan’s most cherished historical moment, “The Holocaust,” not because — as he learns on FACEBOOK — “it is hoax.” Borat’s eye-opening moment comes when he dresses “as Jew” and goes to a Synagogue in despair.

He is threatened with death back home if his mission fails, so he shows up as a Pinocchio-nosed, Hasidic-bearded, devil-tailed (and finger-nailed) “Jew” to end it all in a house of worship.

“Use your venom on me,” he tells two elderly Holocaust survivors. “I am very depressed.”

Cohen’s many disguises are lightly amusing, but the stand-out performance here is by the Bulgarian actress Bakalova. She is brazen. She is committed. She goes all-in on a string of shock-value stunts of ever-escalating vulgarity. And she pulls off the sexily-dressed teen “interviewing” Giuliani with convincing naivete and aplomb.

“I really feel like Melania right now!”

The topicality — filming this well into the COVID outbreak and shutdown — and eagerness to offend are what recommend “Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm.” It’s a fun character to revisit and an important time to bring him back.

Watch the original pre-Obama “Borat” and see how it predicted American decline due to gullibility and Trump-inflamed bigotry.

But there’s plenty of evidence here as well that it’s time for Cohen to let the cheap suit and outrageous accent go.

MPAA Rating: R (Graphic Nudity|Strong Crude & Sexual Content|Language)

Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Maria Bakalova and Rudolph Giuliani

Credits: Directed by Jason Woliner, script by Sacha Baron Cohen, Erica Rivinoja, Jena Friedman, Dan Swimer, Lee Kern, Dan Mazer, Peter Baynham and Anthony Hines.

Running time: 1:35

Husband and wife folk-pop duo Jim Hanft and Samanta Yonak were newlyweds, married after a years long partnership as “Jim & Sam,” when they decided that one epic stunt was the key to them breaking through in the music business.

They would spend 2017 “playing one show a day, every day” as a way of keeping at it, pushing that “career progress” stone up a hill by “making something happen, every single day” musically.

It was a cute gimmick and a clever stunt, and it featured a rigorously-booked tour and a willingness to risk going broke in the process and a need for being generously flexible in their definition of a “gig.”

Because shows fall through. Weather acts up. Planning doesn’t take into account traffic jams. And being newlyweds, the stress of all that and this desire for success just might show up on stage.

“After So Many Days” is their self-filmed (cell phone cameras, mostly) account of that 365 day odyssey, skipping back and forth across the US, flying to Sweden more than once (apparently) to kick off Swedish and European tours, opening for LP in Brussels, having a “big break” show at South by Southwest go badly, playing in an aviation museum’s hangar in England, jamming on a ski lift, talking a London liquor store owner into letting them sing him a song, just to get that day’s gig in.

Hell, they sing to a drive-through barista at Starbucks at one point.

All of which, along with the fact that you’ve never heard of Jim & Sam,” point to a “Well, that didn’t work out as planned” documentary, an hour and twenty-six minutes of snatches of lovely harmonies singing mostly-forgettable tunes, rental cars and flights (not seen, mostly), bickering (gently) onstage and off, nothing here to mourn as tragedy or exult in as triumph.

They take this “crazy” chance on themselves, subleasing their LA flat to help finance the trip, “because NOT doing it would seem even crazier.”

They get advice from a European club owner/soup kitchen operator that “If you live the dream, the dream becomes real.”

And they play in a New York ice cream shop during a blizzard that cancels a raft of New England tour dates, stop and sing for a friendly and appreciative herd of cattle in Europe and even play through a sickbed performance in a UK hotel, summoning guests to come here even though one “band” member has a cold.

The mishmash of travel footage, marked only by show numbers (201, 242, etc) can be confusing, especially if you do the math and wonder what they did on LONG travel days where performing might not be possible, much less practical.

You come away a little impressed, if not particularly enthused. Remember “Once?” Singing couple falls in love singing duets? There’s nothing remotely emotional or as uplifting as any of the songs and scenes in that (fictional, improvised) film from a few years back.

“After So Many Days” lacks drama and pathos, and the humor is mostly in the vein of “Can you believe they’re playing in a Starbucks drive-thru and calling that a ‘gig?” The songs are limited to snippets, the travelogue — LOTS of trips to Sweden, where they have studio access and “fans” — is more impressive for the passport stamps than in the shows sampled.

They’re a cute couple, in that generic skinny jeans way. They harmonize well, and their songs have a (tiny) hint of edge to them. Are they still together? Are they still touring? Or is the song “Calling it Quits,” listed on assorted lyric websites, their farewell to “the dream?”

If so, at least they documented “our biggest show,” opening for LP in Belgium, getting a Euro-crowd to sing along with their drinking ballad, “Saturday Night and you’re all f—-d up again.”

“After So Many Days,” they’ll always have Brussels.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Jim Hanft, Samantha Yonack

Credits: Directed by Jim Hanft and Samantha Yonack, script by Natalia Anderson, Kyle Weber, Jim Hanft and Natalia Anderson.

Running time: 1:26

This is not your grandmother’s — OK your GREAT grandmother’s — “Rebecca,” not the “Rebecca” of Du Maurier and Hitchcock.

And hang me for heresy, that’s not the worst thing in the world. The original plays as fusty and old-fashioned and its story beats and revelations are common currency in film culture these days.

So when this lavish, lush, well-cast and well-acted new Netflix “Rebecca” goes off the rails, as it were, it’s not necessarily going “wrong.” Although sometimes it is.

But it’s far more “faithful” than you’d expect from a trio of screenwriters who gave us “Race” (Jesse Owens bio pic), “Seberg,” “Kick-Ass” and “Kingsmen.” And it’s far more opulent and almost literary, not what one would guess you’d get from the director of the violent thrillers “Free Fire” and “High Rise.”

For Armie Hammer, playing a wealthy British widower to “the manner born” is no stretch.

“Downton Abbey” veteran Lily James is easy to see in a 1930s period piece. But this version of our unnamed “new” Mrs. de Winter gives us the plucky, working class James of “Baby Driver” and “Yesterday.”

Kristin Scott Thomas as the icy, scheming head of household staff Mrs. Danvers? That’s the very definition of “on the nose casting.”

But for me, the icing on the cake, the reason I’m endorsing this “Rebecca” and others are not, is first act scene-stealer Ann Dowd. The “Compliance” and “Handmaid’s Tale” veteran knocks it straight out of the park as our unnamed heroine’s imperious and cruel employer, Mrs. Van Hopper. She is everything one hates about the archetype of Old Money — insufferable, stupid and venal.

As an American snob who has hired an English “lady companion,” Dowd’s withering delivery of every insult is to be relished, none more than the final one she has to offer. Our “lady companion” has won the heart of the brooding but charming and seemingly kind Maxim de Winter (Hammer) after meeting him in Monte Carlo.

“When you trap a man between your legs,” she hisses, “they don’t stay around for long.”

The quick courtship of the rich man who was widowed just a year before raises eyebrows, infuriates the between-World-Wars French hotel staff and makes us fret for the working class girl swept up in wealth, comfort and mystery the moment she arrives at the estate the family has held “since the Tudors.”

That would be Manderlay, of “Last night I went to Manderlay again,” one of the most famous opening lines in all of mystery literature.

That’s what the new Mrs. de Winter is caught up in — “mystery.” How much did Max love the late Rebecca? How did she die? Why will he not speak of that, even though he mentions his “late wife” more often than any newlywed would like to hear?

Is she in danger?

Here is where James’ version of the heroine stands apart. There’s nothing passive about the character, or her way of playing her. She has agency, takes the initiative and merits the line “She’s far smarter than she looks” when it’s said of her later on.

She hears of “Max’s famous temper,” and spends too much time walking on glass around him. But she reaches for answers, snoops about. And she tries desperately to hold her own against the officious and callous ruler of the household staff, Mrs. Danvers.

Kristin Scott Thomas makes the woman’s every look and every line a judgment, hostile in intent. “When Mrs. de Winter was alive” seems to start every sentence. “Mrs. de Winter was very particular about her sauces,” punctuates a dinner menu insult.

Say hello to the genre’s biggest bitch.

And therein lies the fundamental flaw in any traditional adaption of “Rebecca,” reason enough to make this one different. Danvers is obviously hostile and prone to gas-lighting her new mistress. The doubt, the hunch that “maybe there’s a ghost” or that maybe this new situation is making the new Mrs. de Winter mad, or that she does or doesn’t know what her too-new husband is capable of, was always a hard sell. Why not dispense with some of that?

Hammer suggests plenty of menace, displacing the charm and simple kindness that started the romance.

Playing up other characters — the caddish cousin Jack (Sam Riley, a “bounder” if ever there was one) and Max’s sympathetic sister (Keeley Hawes, terrific) shows how this novel was malleable and rich enough to merit mini-series treatment back in the ’90s.

The settings are stunning, the motorcars — Max’s 1930s Bentley 3.5 litre roadster merits mention by the characters in the film — glorious.

But pint-sized James — you never realize how short her other leading men were until you see her paired with Hammer — carries this “Rebecca,” and I think carries it off, even as it’s taking us places no “Rebecca” has ever gone before.

It’s not a classic and not “Hitchcock,” but hell, thanks to James, Hammer, Thomas and Dowd, it’ll do.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexual content, partial nudity, thematic elements and smoking

Cast: Lily James, Armie Hammer, Kristen Scott Thomas and Ann Dowd

Credits: Directed by Ben Wheatley, script by Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

I was wondering why my post about the recognizable (to me, anyway) voice on TV ad from last summer was blowing up this am.

It’s because people weren’t recognizing the instantly recognizable voice on last night’s World Series ad unveiled by The Biden Campaign.

Sam Elliott, anyone? By the way, Jeffrey Wright of “Westworld” and Felix Leiter in the Daniel Craig Bond films was the previous killer voice over Biden star.

This ad? It’s game over in Trumpland. No wonder Putin loving-wingnut America is losing its collective minds over it. An actual man’s man movie star is articulating a better tomorrow than the ditch the NRA, their Russian financiers, Julian Assange and “low information” voters have driven us into.

Here’s a film star memoir that took me by surprise.

Not that Val Kilmer’s “I’m Your Huckleberry” is all that confessional, or filled with gossip and Big Revelations. It’s not.

But it’s a breezy, sometimes self-effacing, sometimes egotistical peek under the hood of a fascinating figure in recent film history.

Think he’ll dodge the “What happened to Val Kilmer?” question, about his looks and career? His health issues — throat cancer, bloating related to that — is right there in the prologue.

Figure he won’t address his rep as “difficult” and a “diva?” That comes through in a sentence or two about his first professional teen acting gig, a commercial…that he WALKED out on. The way he skips by that suggests that maybe he doesn’t see that as a “tell.”

He owns up to the relative privilege of his childhood (Dad was a boom or bust business type), is generous about all the women he’s been linked to over the decades — Mare Winningham was his high school love, Cher, Joanne Whalley, etc. — and jabs “THE Julliard School,” where he was, at 16, “the youngest (actor) ever admitted (no idea if that’s true)” even as he owns up to being a ham, and hamming up his first role there.

The fact that he played the lead in “Richard III” should tell you what a mercurial talent he was, even as a boy. Kilmer sprinted out of the gate faster than any actor of his generation. So what happened?

Some of that’s here, between the lines admissions, etc. Actors by the nature of their profession like having too much drama in their personal lives, he explains. And I believe him. Some of it we gather from his similarities to one of the guys he played — Jim Morrison of The Doors. Kilmer’s “a poet,” a free spirit and a Brando-admiring “rebel” who parlayed fame into a lifestyle that was as Hollywood-free as possible, even as he gained that “reputation.”

He cut up with Robert Downey Jr. on the set of his best film and calls him a “brother.” Wonder if Downey signs off on that?

He name drops like an old pro, Willie and Brando to KRS1. He flogs his Christian Science faith like a man staring death in the face.

I’ve interviewed him a couple of times over the years, and that diva thing never really made itself obvious in these chats. A little full of himself, sure. “Above it all” strut, all that.

But consider the work. He’s turned half a dozen films into great or near great acting exercises.

I’d call “Spartan,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Heat,” “Tombstone,” “Thunderheart” (that Brando bond with Native American causes), “The Doors” and “Wonderland” his best. But “True Romance,” “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” a pretty fun one-off “Batman” and that damned “Top Gun” (He’s back in the sequel, kids.) made some noise and impact on the culture. “The Ghost and the Darkness,” “At First Sight,” and on and on he went.

“Alexander” and his experiences making an epic mess out of “The Island of Doctor Moreau” could make their own books, if he was more open about admitting his sins.

But when he describes the tragic death of his younger brother just as Val was about to enter “THE Julliard School” with an “I felt abandoned,” you understand why. Looking in the mirror doesn’t mean you see and will accurately describe everything in it.

Still, you can’t say we haven’t enjoyed “the show” he’s put on. As he points to all the various ways “Huckleberry” has wound around his life, from the real-life plant in his desert SoCal youth, to falling for Twain as a kid, to “Tombstone” and Doc Holliday (the origin of the title line of the book) to playing “Citizen Twain” in a one-man show, Kilmer’s the sort of narcissistic, creative eccentric that you can’t help but be tickled by. His memoir’s just more proof of that.

VAL KILMER — I’M YOUR HUCKLEBERRY: A Memoir, Simon & Schuster, 303 pages, $27.99.

Oh to be young, male, misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic and alcoholic in modern day St. Petersburg.

They are “Three Comrades” living in Putin’s Proud Boys Russia, a lawless land where men like them drift through young adulthood with no moral compass and limited ambition — to make enough money to reduce the humiliation that working stiffs in a rigged “winner take all” economy endure.

As with his “Anomie,” Vladimir Kozlov paints a bleak portrait of Russian life via a generation that has known only cruelty and repression living in a totalitarian kleptocracy. The rule of law has evaporated (cops are only for the rich), the rule of the Almighty Ruble is all that counts and patriotism, vodka and bullying are all they have to cling to.

So, cautionary to any Western country drifting in that direction? You bet.

Kozlov sets this up as a mockumentary, and pretty much abandons that after we’re introduced to Gosha (Ivan Shary), Vlad (Andrei Yasinsky) and Gleb (Evgeniy Zarubin). They’re brokers, of a sort — young salesman at a small, cutthroat firm run by brutish founder Potapov (Dmitriy Grishin) like he’s seen “Boiler Room” a few too many times.

But in a down economy, there are no sales and the office the three 20somethings share is deflatingly quiet in between their long cigarette breaks. Well, it’s quiet save for hothead Gleb’s curses and phone-slamming.

In their introductions, spoken directly to the camera, they confess (in Russian, with English subtitles) that “I don’t like my job very much,” with sweater-wearing Gosha the only one with a girlfriend and real “plans” and all “very critical” of the Russia they struggle to live in.

There’s nothing for it in this land of the midnight sun (it’s set in spring) but to go out after work, “just for two drinks,” ome cigarettes and some more conversation. Olya (Olga Serikova), the blonde from down the hall? She can be talked into joining them even though she knows what “your ‘two drinks'” means.

That’s how it starts, downing beers and bitching at a brightly-lit pub that looks like a Chili’s, but without the warmth and charm. The sexist, brutish chatter whenever Olya leaves the table makes us fear for her safety. But she knows them, and knows to skip after two drinks.

It’s what happens as the night wears on that turns the evening fraught and the “Three Comrades” into every ugly stereotype listed in the opening of this review. An old woman begs for change and takes abuse. Two young women walking home are accosted, approached and threatened. A Russian punk band’s fans get an earful after a desultory club set, and one is promptly pummeled when Gleb, the ringleader, likes the three-to-one odds and the chance to batter a guy actually out on a date.

“Incels” you can’t help but think. Remembering Gosha, with his mild-mannered sweaters and attentive phone call from a woman, has a girlfriend changes nothing. These three proles are liquored up and up for a little ultraviolence. It comes like “Clockwork.”

Kozlov keeps the tone disquieting, even in scenes where we might logically assume we can relax. We can see the groupthink that runs this pack, with Gleb the one who instigates, lumpish Vlad, the least ambitious, is quickest to join in with Gosha close behind.

A “foreigner” from part of the former Soviet Empire talks to “one of our women?” He gets it, too.

There’s even an overtly political interlude, as an unemployed Afghan War veteran (Nikolay Sayapin) cadges a drink off them and sadly and cynically lays out how bleak the country’s prospects are in its struggles against America and the “communist capitalists” of China. “We’re all alone” with nothing but “losers” (Venezuela, North Korea, et al) in their corner, outclassed, outhustled and outsmarted at every turn. All is lost.

Unless the West lets people who emulate The Russian Way take charge.

“Three Comrades” is short but not rushed, and rough viewing almost from start to finish. The documentary style (hand held camera, even in chases) adds to the sad reality of it all, lives of drunken, hate-filled desperation.

Forget the propaganda and the endless endorsements of pot-bellied Proud Boys, rednecks and Republicans for Russia. This is the reality of Putinworld. How anyone, especially any woman, would want to live like this beggars belief.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Evgeniy Zarubin, Ivan Shary, Andrei Yasinsky, Olga Serikova, Dmitriy Grishin, Ksenia Plyusnina, Nikolay Sayapin

Credits: Written and directed by Vladimir Kozlov. An IndiePix release.

Running time: 1:11