Best known for his supporting parts as foursquare military and intelligence types, such as Secret Service Agent Aaron Pierce in seven series of 24, Glenn Morshower gets to play a rare leading role – and a very different kind of character – in this indie road movie set in 1980.
In The Doo Dah Man he’s a smooth-talking con man, newly escaped from an Arizona prison, who takes Will Brittain’s prickly high-school graduate under his wing and teaches him the art of flimflamming as they travel in a stolen car towards the Florida Keys. One is fleeing from the cops; the other is on the run from his unreliable father...
Based on the teenage experiences of co-writer Jack Ballo, the pair’s backroads adventures are fairly low-key (the obligatory car chase is distinctly unexciting), but the surrogate father-son relationship that emerges from their travels proves quietly engaging.
One puzzle remains, however. What the hell is a Catholic nun – whom the pair are touching for money with a typical spot of blarney – doing in a First Lutheran church?
Director Claude Green. 2015. 95 mins.
The Doo Dah Man debuts on Sky Cinema Premiere on Thursday 16 November.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy-bFFewKCk
