The Roaring 20s, the dive bar at the center of Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, is at once the ultimate dead end and a tentative last chance. The daily denizens who gather there ride a roller coaster of drunken self-confidence and sober self-loathing. Yet even in their lowest moments, they’re together. It’s the last place they’re accepted as they are, which makes it either a blessing or tragedy that the bar is closing for good. What we witness over the course of the film are its final bleary, belligerent, occasionally beautiful 24 hours.
Not that the movie is Pollyannaish about the lives it depicts. Even Michael—who sleeps at the bar because he has nowhere else to go, shaving in the bathroom before opening time each day to start the cycle again—says to a fellow drinker at one point: “I am somebody you hang out with in a bar. I am not your family.”
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets perches delicately on that tipping point. Is this a portrait of grace at the bottom of the bottle, where all are welcome no matter their weaknesses? Or does it depict an oasis of enabling, where freedom means the ability to drink oneself to death? When Michael escorts Ira, another bar buddy—so drunk that beer dribbles down his chin—out the door because Ira has to go to work, the moment captures both sides of that coin. This community is there for Ira as long as he’s drinking, but do they care about what happens to him when he heads out into the midday glare? No one in The Roaring 20s wants to follow the light, and they almost all do it alone.
Throughout Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets—at least during the daytime hours—that blaring rectangle of the bar’s front door burns like a curse. At some point, they’ll all have to walk into it, especially now that The Roaring 20s is closing for good. The brother directing team of Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross, who also handle the cinematography, lend a soft pink glow to the bar scenes, offering an ambient hug around the loud conversations and occasional arguments among the dozen or so people who drift in and out of the establishment. Punctuating these sequences are brief, travelogue shots of the surrounding Las Vegas streets—faded yellow, like photographs found at the bottom of a drawer.
The Ross brothers also manage two transcendent musical moments as part of the aesthetic mix. In the first, Mark, the bartender, picks up a guitar and serenades everyone with a lovely rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” (There’s a great shot of Michael’s reflection in the bar mirror as he watches, transfixed.) The other moment occurs far later, deep into the night, when the party reaches its apex and everyone marches out into the parking lot, carrying sparklers, for a group dance to the forgotten Sophie B. Hawkins gem “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover,” which is playing on the jukebox. Most of this we witness via the bar’s security camera, which offers a degree of distance from the exuberance of the moment, rendering it both inspiring and pathetic.
There’s a lot of coordination involved in that sequence, which will likely confirm what astute viewers have already suspected: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is not a documentary in the traditional sense. The Ross brothers “cast” the film by hanging out in similar bars around New Orleans, eventually gathering the right group for what is effectively a staged scenario. Though “set” in Las Vegas, the film’s actual location is in New Orleans, in a bar that wasn’t about to be shut down. Filmed over two, 18-hour days, the conversations (and drink orders) are all improvised.
The result is still something closer to documentary than, say, the work of Sean Baker, whose The Florida Project and Tangerine rely heavily on the performances of nonprofessional actors in stories based closely on their actual lives. Yet Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is certainly nothing like the fly-on-the-wall documentaries we get from the likes of Steve James and Frederick Wiseman. Perhaps the movie’s closest analogs are Abbas Kiarostami films such as Close-Up or A Moment of Innocence, which similarly blend prearranged situations with nonprofessional actors, often recreating versions of their own real-life experiences.
The Ross brothers would likely argue that these definitions don’t matter. Certainly one approach isn’t better than another; it’s not as if one is “false” while the other is “true.” But there is a distinction worth making. Fiction, I’d argue, best captures the universal, while documentary—like journalism—details the specific. If Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a singular achievement, it’s in the way the movie manages to do a little bit of both.
