MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Montana Run’: Bleak Side of Comedy

“The Montana Run� (opening Friday at the NuWilshire) isn’t about a shopping spree on a tony street in Santa Monica, but rather a road trip by several stand-up comics through a string of comedy clubs and dives in the Northwest--with all the laughter, the sadness, the sex, the moo-cow sounds in the car that that entails.

The principal cast members--who are also responsible for the writing, directing and most other creative facets of this independent production--are, in fact, Seattle-based comedians who know the Montanan hell of which they speak. And as you’d expect, the film has a real feel for what it’s like to go on in front of a handful of heckling drunks and be funny after a day of junk food and strained relations in the back seat.

If anything, the picture is a little too “inside,� in its expectation that the faintly amusing anecdotes of low-rent show-biz road life and the audience’s concern for the sketchy characters will outweigh the noticeable lack of a plot. It’s a more convincing evocation of the lifestyle than, say, “Punchline,� and has a few very funny vignettes along the way, but doesn’t really add up to much of a movie.

Randy Thompson, who directed, co-wrote, co-edited and scored the film, stars as a fussy, successful, San Francisco-based comic who arrives in Seattle to find that he’s unexpectedly been booked on the rural bar circuit by burnt-out promoter Ron Reid. Feeling too good for all this--he’s been on HBO, after all--Thompson reluctantly agrees to hop in Reid’s derelict car along with two lesser-known local comedians, a cheerful divorcee (Mayme Paul-Thompson, his wife in real life) and a crude, bitter sexist (Dan Lishner).

The film stays almost entirely off-stage, which may have been a mistake; the four principals are more involving seen doing their routines than they are bemoaning their lifestyle and “relating� to each other. And it hits bottom with a motel-room love scene between the two Thompsons, scored to an unbearably earnest balladic duet, “This Time Is the First Time,� which sounds like a parody of a Hollywood romantic theme but isn’t.

Like the other awful, lounge-style pop songs on the soundtrack, that number was written by the ubiquitous actor-director himself, who bit off more than he should have chewed by tackling the music too. Still, “The Montana Run� (Times-rated Mature) isn’t all cud. However slight its slice-o’-life ambitions are, Thompson’s film looks positively fabulous for a $200,000 production, and the actors’ vividly drawn characterizations make it worthy of a better run than it’s likely to get.

‘The Montana Run’

Randy Thompson: Andy Miller

Ron Reid: Doug Atkins

Dan Lishner: Brock Mason

Mayme Paul-Thompson: Charli McKnight

A Greycat Films release. Director-producer Randy Thompson. Executive producers Sam Behr, Grant Beck. Screenplay Thompson, Ron Reid, Dan Lishner. Cinematographer Wm Brooks Baum. Editors Thompson, Tim Maffia. Music Thompson. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (language and sexuality).