Rubin & Ed

Trent Harris's 1992 film brings two men together in the Utah desert. Rubin has cut himself off from the world and does not leave his room; he is carrying his dead cat in a cooler and looking for the perfect place to bury it. Ed is a man who cannot get anywhere in sales meetings and never stops talking. Crispin Glover's Rubin is among the most extreme performances of his career. The character wears platform shoes, builds his sentences in a strange rhythm and never normalises in any scene. The film does not present this as a display of oddity; Rubin's loneliness is real and painful. The desert sections turn it into a road movie without a destination. Almost nobody saw the film on release; it acquired cult status later and now counts among the strangest works of late-eighties American independent cinema. Who it's for: those who love cult films and Crispin Glover. Who it's not for: viewers looking for narrative logic and character development; almost nothing is explained across the film.