Going Nomad Reviews

So wispy that a gritty blast of New York air would blow it right away, this affable little tale revolves around a group of die-hard New Yorkers. Friends since grammar school, they've never been to the Empire State Building or Coney Island; they've scarcely been above 14th Street, let alone off Manhattan island. The group's hub is El Cid Rivera (Damian Young) — his mom had a thing about Charlton Heston — who's drifting aimlessly through life working dead-end jobs like bill collector, short-order cook and tour guide. Not that the rest of the guys are burning rubber on the fast track: One's a failed priest who works in a tollbooth, another rents apartments in run-down neighborhoods ("you keep saying firetrap," he grumbles in a recurring bit), a third lives to shower; they all congregate for a nightly gabfest in a local bar. When interesting people obsess it's called philosophizing; when boring people do, it isn't called anything because nobody listens, and the unfortunate fact is that Cid and his pals are gaseous windbags. There's a little plot involving Cid's romance with Officer Geraldine Fusco (Jourdan Zayles), a take-charge gal he once punched out back in fourth grade, but mostly writer-director Art Jones is interested in his nocturnal drives. Cid, you see, is one of Manhattan's asphalt nomads, apparently ordinary New Yorkers who, driven by some inchoate restlessness, get in their big-ass '70s boats and drive by night, grooving on the empty streets and searching for that perfect ride. There's a loose-knit society of nomads, and they pour out their poetic souls to the camera, all eventually coming round to the legendary Cid. Unfortunately, everything they have to say is watered-down Beat rambling, a couple of decades too late to sound fresh and rebellious.