Goodbye Solo

Solo, a Senegalese taxi driver in Winston-Salem, gets an unusual proposal from an elderly passenger: the man pays him in advance to drive him, on a specific day, to Blowing Rock, a clifftop. He does not want a return trip. Solo works out what that means and spends the intervening days trying to talk him out of it. Ramin Bahrani declines to turn this into a rescue story. Solo is insistent, talkative and determined to help. William does not want help and says so plainly. All the tension in the film lives between those two positions. Souleymane Sy Savane and Red West lead, and the distance between them is layered with age, language and country. Blowing Rock is itself a sign: the updraft there sends anything you drop back upward. The difficulty is that it is slow, quiet and refuses to close. You are not told what happened. Who it is for: plain, unadorned American independent cinema. Who it is not for: anyone who needs an answer.