The film opens with Judith (“Welcome to the Dollhouse’s” Heather Matarazzo) and her brainy older brother, Wesley (Zach Braff), waiting in a seedy bus station in upstate New York to be taken to separate destinations. He’s going to college; she’s there to visit her mother, Trix (Bebe Neuwirth), in a mental hospital. Like the losers and misfits who wander in and out of bars in Eugene O’Neill plays, the regulars at the bus station, especially the nonstop talker Jimmy, engage the young Judith and get her to tell her story. It’s not a pretty one.
As told in flashbacks, Judith and Wesley were raised, or rather barely tolerated, by their parents Trix and Darrell (Mark Blum), both failed entertainers who ended up on booze instead of Broadway. What unfolds is fairly predictable (parents fight, kids hide) until violence reaps the inevitable divorce. What sets Skyler’s film apart, aside from the uniformly terrific performances, are the subplots involving Oates’s cache of unforgettable characters.
There’s the gambling addict, Sonny (a delightfully debauched Chris Noth from “Sex and the City”), and his naive one-night stand, Irene (played by Tristine Skyler, the director’s sister and co-screenwriter), who can’t understand why Sonny won’t return her phone calls. Then there’s Leila Lee (the exquisite Mary McCormack), who married Bible-pounding Lamar only to end up witnessing Lamar’s son hatchet his father to death. Most memorable is Jimmy (Michael Weston), the bus-station gadfly who fills his own pained heart with other people’s stories. As he and Judith get to know one another, they silently come to the same conclusion: their futures are bound to be better than their pasts.
