Off the Rails

Darius McCollum grew up in Queens. Bullied at school, the place he took refuge in was the subway. There he made friends with the transit workers and learned from them how to drive trains. By the age of eight he had memorised the whole system. At fifteen he took a full train eight stops on his own, making every stop and every announcement. Over the next thirty years he did the same with hundreds of trains and buses, always on route and on time. He never took any money for it. For that he was arrested thirty two times and spent twenty three years in prison. McCollum has Asperger’s syndrome, and the documentary handles this not as a crime story but as a question about the justice system. Adam Irving’s American documentary of 2016 runs eighty seven minutes.