MIDDLE MAN tells the story of Lenny (Jim O’Heir), a regular joe with dreams of hitting it big on the Vegas comedy circuit. When his mother dies, Lenny decides to throw caution to the wind and drive her old ’53 Oldsmobile to Las Vegas to audition for comedy giant Monte Guy’s annual “Stand Up Stand Off" competition. Lenny has dreamed of being comedian since he was a kid and he would listen to tapes of classic routines from the likes of Jack Benny, George Burns, Abbot and Costello and other comedy legends. He grew up to be an accountant and a pretty uninteresting guy. Now is the time it will all change. Stardom awaits.
On his way to Vegas, he stops to pick up a hitchhiker, appropriately called Hitch (Andrew J. West). When the pair stop for gas and food in a small nowhere desert town called Lamb Bone, things begin to change. Upon hearing that a local dive has an open-mic comedy night, Hitch, Lenny’s newly-crowned manager, talks his hesitant client into trying out his routine before the big audition. When he gets up on stage, we learn that he has a bit of a problem - Lenny isn’t funny. At all. In fact, he’s painfully unfunny. So unfunny that he quickly gets heckled and booed off the stage. Lenny and Hitch end the night in a drunken stupor, as Lenny tries to come to terms with the evening’s disaster.
The next morning, the pair wakes to find the heckler dead in the trunk of their car. It’s unclear just who committed the crime, but Lenny and Hitch know they don’t want anything to do with the finding of a corpse in their trunk. Lenny begins the hilariously inept process of trying to dispose of the body. Strangely enough, the trauma and stress of this incident has a magnificent effect on his standup routine. Exhausted, disheveled and covered in blood after the hasty burial of their uninvited guest, he nonetheless succumbs to Hitch’s encouragement that he give the stage another go. And this time, he kills it with a dazed, awkward account of exactly what happened to the heckler from the night before.
After that, it seems Lenny’s star is on the rise. But where it is going is anyone’s guess. Ned Crowley crafts a darkly funny, yet very strange world in his feature debut. Comedy is a recurring theme throughout the film, not just in terms of Lenny’s goal, but also in the people he finds himself surrounded by. The town is a bit of a weigh station, populated by a number of standups who arrived hoping to pass through on their way to Vegas, yet have never managed to leave. Clever interaction and word play abound between the locals – it seems everyone in this story is funny and witty except for Lenny. He has found himself in this strange limbo, yet he doesn't seem to fully belong.
MIDDLE MAN is very much a parable, with Lenny at one end, and Hitch at the other. They are bound together by a nefarious contract meant to net fame and fortune, but perhaps with something sinister at heart. O’Heir does a great turn as Lenny, totally selling the unassuming nice guy personality, while really leaning in to the darker comedy that ensues when Lenny starts losing it as the stress of his situation builds. West provides a great counterpart in Hitch, just unhinged enough to even the scales with Lenny’s apple pie outlook, but never crazy enough to take it too far. He has some wonderfully menacing moments as the plot unfolds, and West gives him just enough darkness to make him unbalanced, but never so much that we stop taking the character seriously.
The fable nature of the story provides an entertaining framework to dissect and examine the lust for fame and fortune and the lengths to which one will go to get it. Where is the link between achieving your dreams and losing your soul? Is there any way to get it back once you’ve traveled down that path? MIDDLE MAN offers an entertaining and extremely dark look at the process. There’s a lot here for nerds and scholars of classic comedy and entertainment, and plenty of blood drenched dark humor along the way.
