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Frank (Emile Hirsch), a working-poor sad sack in Reno, Nevada, is struggling to get enough money so he and his brother (Stephen Dorff) might buy a different car and get out of town. His brother, Jerry, has accidentally killed a child with his car, and he’s afraid of going back to jail. Even their desperate situation—sleeping in their car and occasionally motels—is better than that. But Frank’s a naive sort, and he puts his faith in a gambling-addict buddy (Joshua Leonard, in the movie’s brightest performance) to bet a few hundred dollars of his money on a boxing match. The lovely digression starts when they wait for the match to unfold. Frank and his buddy decide to watch it at a low-rent casino, taking along a schizophrenic guy (coscreenwriter Noah Harpster) they know from the bar.
I won’t reveal how the episode concludes, suffice it to say that The Motel Life soon returns to the more downbeat tone it had established earlier. Frank organizes his life around helping Jerry, an unemployed depressive of limited intelligence with half of one leg missing. Their relationship is often poignant—thanks, in no small part, to Hirsch and Dorff, two actors who’ve become increasingly resonant on-screen presences as they’ve aged and grown less pretty. At the same time, something about their story strains credibility. It isn’t that they’ve experienced so many hardships (the brothers were teenage runaways; Frank, in early adulthood, was in love with a girl being sexually abused by her mother), but that the narrative piles them on in such a way that the characters seem practically crushed beneath them.
