Colson Baker is a promising actor (The Last Son, Midnight in the Switchgrass) who continues to evolve away from his better-known personas: a white rapper with a silly name (he alternates between Machine Gun Kelly and sometimes just MGK), actor Megan Fox’s arm candy, and sometime-Jackass satellite. Here Baker takes a starring role as a low-level LA hoodlum called Freddy who has stolen a bag of cash and cocaine from now very angry associates, a Puerto Rican gang led by sociopath Vic (a regal Drea de Matteo, still best known for playing Adriana in The Sopranos).
Shot in the gut while fleeing, Freddy boards a coach headed for a small town in Georgia and it’s onboard where most of the rest of the film takes place – apart from cutaways to the various people Freddy phones, such as Vic, his nurse ex-girlfriend (Meagan Holder), a nervous associate (Rhys Coiro), and his deadbeat father (Kevin Bacon), listed as “Asshole” in Freddy’s contact list. Meanwhile, sitting in the seat in front of him is Rachel (Storm Reid), a precocious young woman who is probably underage but pretending to be 21. She’s run out of minutes on her own phone, so she improbably manages to persuade Freddy to let her borrow his in order to make arrangements with a mysterious stranger named Smokie who is clearly grooming her.
Although director Andrew Baird and his camera crew go a bit overboard with the woozy handheld camera, strobe lighting and fluttery editing to add edginess, the script – by Ben Conway – isn’t half bad and exploits the crammed-space dynamics well. The weird sense of querulous community that develops over long journeys in public transport vehicles is evoked especially well, with fellow passengers who are sometimes kindly, sometimes rude, and sometimes just sinister. Baker, with his scrawny frame and ratty features, can actually act, although he’s consistently upstaged by young Reid, as the stronger performer and the one with the more interesting character story here.
• One Way is released on 2 September on digital platforms.
