Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
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Co-directors Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross's genre-bending docudrama focuses on a Las Vegas dive bar named 'The Roaring 20s' as it prepares to close its doors forever. Its longtime bartenders and patrons come together for one last night of alcohol-charged camaraderie, commemoration and consolation as they contemplate their place in a fracturing and downcast late-2016 America.
135 minutes. Not rated. Directed by Bill & Turner Ross
In the shadows of the bright lights of Las Vegas, it’s last call for a beloved dive bar known as the Roaring 20s. Its regulars, a cross section of American life, form a community—tight-knit yet forged in happenstance, teetering between dignity and debauchery, reckoning with the past as they face an uncertain future. That’s the premise, at least; the reality is as unreal as the world they’re escaping from. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a mosaic of disparate lives adrift in a failed society—disillusioned and reeling, singing while their ship goes down.
Filmmaking duo Bill and Turner Ross (Western, 2015 Sundance Film Festival) return with an elegiac portrait of a tiny world fading away but still warm and beating with the comfort of community. Their beguiling approach to nonfiction storytelling makes for a foggy memory of experience lost in empty shot glasses and puffs of smoke.