On the Road With Judas 3 stars
Aaron Ruell, Kevin Corrigan, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Eleanor Hutchins, Leo Fitzpatrick, Amanda Loncar, Alex Burns
Directed by JJ Lask
Author Lask wrote the real-life book On the Road with Judas. He then wrote a screenplay for and directed a film of the same name about a character based on himself (Corrigan), who writes a book about a pair of “real-life” Mac thieves (Ruell and Burns) and the actors who portray them (Thomas and Fitzpatrick) in a film-within-a-film.
It’s a multi-layered beast all right, and though Judas owes an obvious debt to Adaptation, it’s denser, less self-obsessed and, above all, more heartfelt. The 1993 it conjures—though, curiously, the utilized Beck and Weezer tracks emerged in 1996—is a world of beepers, Pac Man jokes, narcissism and David Lee Roth, one in which the title character has everything he wants but nothing he needs (i.e. love).
That tenuous relationship, however, is what the film also lacks. All the angst spilt over something that barely exists doesn’t hold its own against the far more interesting ruminations on art versus reality and why every human being essentially plays a characterization of themselves every day. Clever and stylish, Judas raises some great questions, but like its ambitious characters, it ultimately fails to achieve self-fulfillment.