Manodrome (2023) – Two stars.

In Manodrome, Jesse Eisenberg plays Ralph, a down and out loser who succumbs eventually to his rage, alienation and overall brokenness.

The story begins with one of his Uber passengers, calling him a creep and running away from him. She was breastfeeding her child, which he is caught looking at. He is alone, looking out at the world, unable to access love, feeling, life or anything else remotely nutritious. He is a baby himself, bulked up in the gym, but barely communicative, perpetually curling up, like a standing fetal position.

We don’t hear his thoughts, but we can assume there’s some thin trail of commentary there. All we can see is where his eyes furtively glance to, or away from. Gym rats tease him ‘still looking. still hungry.’ We see very little emotion or feeling echoing back from what the world throws at him. He’s trying to stay positive. He wants people to show a ‘little respect’. Everything he says, feels and does is undercooked, until it’s not.

His heavily pregnant partner asks him basic questions like, where did you go, how will I get home tonight. Simple questions, but there doesn’t seem to be a simple answer available to Ralph. Maybe these questions do not register. Is he focused on something else, that we can’t see? Is his soul responding to her, but it’s buried so deep in mud we can’t hear it? His compass, or any method for orienteering through the world is not completely gone, but seems to be constantly broken, or worse, hallucinatory.

Trash in, trash out. Pumping iron, for many people seems to provide a boundary, a weak fence-line between him and the abyss. He can reliably go there, and at least things don’t seem to get worse. Push on the bar, it goes the right way. When he pushes on anything else, things go wrong.

This lack of balance or inability to rest in a middle ground is exasperated by his run-in with Dad Dan’s (Adrien Brody) crew of lost boys. They shake him up, beg him to voice his concerns, to scream, to reverb, to bounce back. He is given some explanations for why he is the way he is, and offered a potential path out of hell.

Like a lot of similar stories, he starts to take on more agency. To step out of his rut, he stops listening to himself, or others. He follows a basic motto. Is he transforming? He has been treading water, almost drowning, does he now have one hand on a rope, or is he starting to swim even deeper? Is beating up a stranger heroic or cowardly? Up or down? The answer, which is unanimously ‘down’, makes this film un-interesting. There is no tension or complexity or questions we need to ask ourselves. He’s a rock dropping out of the window that doesn’t know it’s been thrown. It’s almost always a tragedy when someone deeply believes they are right.

Instead of a hero’s journey, where there is often a ‘fake it till you make it’ stage while the universe (or Yoda) nods and urges you forward, Ralph actualizes in the wrong direction. He’s getting more confused. He’s painting with broader strokes. He’s an out of tune radio, but now the volume is cranked. He’s churning out spreadsheets but the source data is wrong. His misery is externalized, with predictable results. Sex, screaming, shooting. More people are now sucked into his suffering.

In one of the final scenes, Ralph is on the run from the law and has broken into a restaurant pantry. A worker catches him feasting on bread like a feral dog. The man looks at him with a sort unconditional acceptance, a stark contrast to every other person who usually responds to him out of fear, habit, manipulation or transactionally. Stunned momentarily, more out of confusion than clarity, Ralph puts the gun to his head. It clicks. It’s the punchline of a long, cosmic joke. Someone, somewhere is laughing.

The stranger takes him home and tells him a story. When he was little, he fell overboard into freezing water. He’s drowning, and thinks he will die. He takes one last breath, but can see his dad swimming to save him. In one moment he understood death, life and love, certainly. Three things Ralph doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know. Ralph is still drowning. Ralph blinks, and then curls back into a fetal ball, falling into deep unconscious – as we see the flashing lights of the police streaming toward the building.