Sundance review: 'Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets' puts real people in an unreal bar

‘Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets’

★★★

Playing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 89 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, Feb. 1, noon, Resort (Sundance).

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Blurring a line that its subjects are too drunk to walk, Bill and Turner Ross’ “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” looks at a group of barflies in a Las Vegas watering hole that is fascinating to watch — especially if you don’t think about how much of it is fictional.

The festival’s film guide doesn’t reveal much about the movie, other than to say “it’s last call for a beloved dive bar known as the Roaring 20s,” and that it chronicles “real people in an unreal situation facing an uncertain future: America at the end of 2016.” And if moviegoers hadn’t read the Los Angeles Times article about the movie earlier this week, that’s all they might have known.

The Turner brothers, known for such verité documentaries as “Western” (SFF ’15), make no bones about the fact that aspects of the movie are fabricated. The brothers cast 22 non-actors — people they found at other bars — and put them together for a day and night in a bar they rented in Las Vegas. And just before they started shooting, they told the 22 people to pretend that the bar was closing at the end of the night.

Whether that fits your definition of a documentary is your call to make. Certainly the people are real, as are their interactions, even if the setting is not.

There are some scenes in which the experiment works, where the Rosses, as the only people operating cameras in the bar, capture little moments of honest connection. The most interesting person in the bar is Michael, an actor and self-confessed alcoholic, though he says, “I take it as a point of pride that I didn’t become an alcoholic until I was already a failure.” Toward the end, Michael has a heart-to-heart with a young patron, Zack, warning him not to wind up like he did.

Others filter in and out of the bar, including a philosophical Vietnam veteran, a drag queen, an Australian with a mysterious brown paper bag, and a hothead in a sports coat. The day bartender, Michael, plays guitar and sings Roy Orbison. The night bartender, Shay, has a teen son who hangs out in the alley behind the bar with his friends, smoking pot.

Even if you don’t know about the fiction of how this came to be, sometimes the moments seem too on-the-nose. The characters have matched up a bit too perfectly, the emotions just a bit too accessible. Mostly, though, “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” feels like spending a night with some drunks in a bar — and it’s up to the individual moviegoer how much of that one will tolerate.