On one of Cinemax’s tertiary channels late Monday night, I finally saw Highway, a pathetic little action-thriller movie filmed three and a half years ago under the working title A Leonard Cohen Afterworld.
It’s an awful low-budget (yet completely corporate) “Gen X” movie like hundreds of others. It starts in Las Vegas with Jared Leto getting caught schtumping a mobster’s wife. Leto and pal Jake Gyllenhaal run from the mobster’s hired thugs by taking a road trip, ending in Seattle. Along the way they have unimaginative misadventures, punctuated by unimaginative cuss words that are apparently meant to be funny just because they’re really loud.
It only qualifies for mention here because of one scene toward the end—a full-scale re-creation of the Kurt Cobain memorial at the Seattle Center International Fountain. I saw it being filmed—that’s the only reason I can tell you it was a full-scale re-creation. All you see on screen are a few close-ups of the actors. Leto is heard complaining that Kurt’s death meant nothing to him compared with the demise of “that Led Zeppelin guy.” The thugs promptly show up. The dudes run off. One shot later and we’re a mile and a half away in Pioneer Square, where the thugs (in cars) finally catch up to, and beat the metaphoric crap out of, the dudes (who’ve presumably been running all that way).
Naturally, neither Nirvana nor any other Seattle act is heard on the soundtrack, a pseudo-“grunge” guitar pastiche created by a member of the more Hollywood-acceptable Black Crowes.
Not only does the story have nothing to do with Cobain, it contradicts almost everything he stood for. It treats its characters as one-dimensional stereotypes. It treats young-adult males in general as a target market to be cynically marketed to. It insults the intelligence of its would-be audience. It glorifies violence and stupidity. Its “heroes” are just the sort of jocks-in-punk-clothing Cobain had repeatedly denounced.
A much better version of the same premise can be found in the 1998 Canadian indie drama The Vigil (for Kurt Cobain).
The guys n’ gals on that film’s road trip are depicted as human beings, who loved Cobain’s music and learn to love one another. The Vigil doesn’t actually show the vigil. To re-create it the way Highway did would’ve busted The Vigil‘s tiny budget. So instead its road-trippers show up in Seattle a day late, but decide they’ve had an invaluable learning and coming-O-age experience from the journey itself.
Nobody learns anything in Highway, except perhaps not to get caught schtumping a mobster’s wife.
