LUCKY

LUCKY is a 2017 drama starring Harry Dean Stanton as a 90-year-old atheist who’s having a philosophical crisis as he comes to realize his mortality. LUCKY is slow-moving, sometimes hilarious, but mostly drab humanistic musing.

Stanton plays the title character Lucky, a Navy veteran living in a very small desert town. His routine is the same: he wakes up, smokes, does yoga, watches his game shows, smokes more, does crosswords at the local diner, and then finishes the night at a local bar where he hangs out with some of the locals. When the bartender asks Lucky what the word of the day is, referring to his crossword puzzle, Lucky says “realism” and recites the definition. The next morning, while making coffee, Lucky falls over in the kitchen.

Lucky’s Doctor says there’s nothing wrong with Lucky, and that for 90-years-old, he’s in remarkable health, especially for how much he smokes. This startles Lucky, who hasn’t thought much about dying. Through conversations with acquaintances and strangers, Lucky muses what the point of it all is anyways.

In LUCKY, Harry Dean Stanton, who is 91-years-old in real life, does a terrific job playing the quirky Lucky. Several details about Lucky’s backstory are actually borrowed from Stanton’s real life. Directed by acting veteran John Carroll Lynch, the small-town, quiet life is captured accurately. As Lucky walks around town, Lynch replaces a traditional score with harmonica riffs that add to the simple, laid back pacing of the movie. One of the best moments is when one of Lucky’s bar buddies, Howard, played about acclaimed Director David Lynch goes off on a lecture about the cosmic importance of tortoises, specifically, his pet tortoise Mr. Roosevelt who ran away. The scene is both hilarious and oddly moving.

Unfortunately, LUCKY is missing some serious soul, which is clearly intentional, since the main message of the movie is that “it’s all nothing,” and life is meaningless. The movie ends with a humanistic diatribe from Lucky that attempts a “seize the day, for tomorrow we die” feeling, but comes off as depressing. Because of this worldview, and abundant foul language, LUCKY can’t be recommended for media wise viewers.