Starring: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes
Director: Derek Cianfrance
Category: IIB
The director of , Derek Cianfrance, is reunited with that moody, anti-romantic drama's lead actor in . This time, however, Ryan Gosling shares top billing with Bradley Cooper in an atmospheric drama that focuses on two men who are hardly ideal father material.
Gosling plays Luke, a brooding stunt motorcyclist with a travelling carnival that's temporarily pitched up in the small, upstate New York town of Schenectady (whose name is loosely derived from the Mohawk word for "place beyond the pines").
With tattoos on his pretty face, arms and body, and a penchant for wearing torn T-shirts, peroxide blond-haired Luke's the kind of fellow who spells trouble with a capital T, the type of trouble that certain women find attractive. That's what happened with local gal Romina (Eva Mendes) and a previous rendezvous has left her pregnant.
In contrast, law school graduate turned police officer Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper) appears - at least at first glance - to be straight arrow material. But after crossing paths with Luke, Cross, the ambitious son of a retired, but still influential state supreme court judge (Harris Yulin), shows himself to be someone who attracts and causes his own share of trouble.
The tendency to be a magnet for trouble is something both Luke and Avery pass to their male progeny, even though neither man has spent much time with their sons. So the omens are not good when Avery's son A.J. (Emory Cohen) and Luke's son Jason (Dane DeHaan) become acquainted at school and connect through their mutual taste for recreational drugs.
