Written and Directed by Logan Marshall-Green
Starring Ethan Hawke
Running time: 1 Hour and 18 Minutes

by Ian Hrabe

Throughout his career, Ethan Hawke has pretty much been relegated to being a solid hand. Sometimes he really shines--as in Richard Linklater’s Before series--but usually he’s a B+ player. Never awful, never truly outstanding, always very good. Then something changed and all of a sudden we find Ethan Hawke launching a career renaissance a la Matthew McConaughey (2012-2014). Or maybe I was just so blown away by his turn in 2017’s First Reformed that I’m suddenly all in on Ethan Hawke and that is a bit of wishful thinking on my part.

In Adopt a Highway, Hawke plays an ex-con named Russell Millings. The film opens with Russell looking through newspaper clippings about his youth and the arrest for a drug violation that, due to California’s Three-Strikes Law, landed him a 25 year prison sentence. Russell has been granted parole after serving 20 and, right up front, we know exactly what this movie is about: draconian prison sentences designed to punish rather than rehabilitate and destroy lives for the sake of it, especially in the case of non-violent offenders.

As Russell goes through his belongings from his intake 20 years prior, we get a profound look at how much time has been lost. Hawke’s beautifully subtle performance and Jason Isbell’s arresting score drive this quietly heartbreaking scene, and the film’s masterful first act sets up a redemption story about a man learning to readjust to a world that has left him behind. Unfortunately, while taking out the trash at his menial dishwashing job, Russell finds a crying baby that has been abandoned in a dumpster and that is where the movie goes off the rails.

Adopt a Highway is a cautionary tale of how not to make your debut feature. Director Logan Marshall-Green is a fine, Ethan Hawke pre-First Reformed type actor who has turned in solid performances in films like Prometheus, Upgrade, and The Invitation, but man oh man did he write this script in a vacuum? Does he not have friends in Hollywood who could have told him, “Hey, maybe don’t have the main character be a complete moron for the sake of driving the plot and find a more elegant way to get to where this story needs to go.” Instead of calling the police, or taking the baby to the police station (potentially out of fear of being sent back to prison as he is still on parole?), Russell takes the baby back to his rattrap hotel room and we are treated to a comedy of errors involving a hapless man trying to figure out how to take care of a baby. There’s solid symbolism here, paralleling two people who were abandoned by the world and given a second chance, and maybe he does it because he wants to prove he has something to offer the world, but tonally this shift in the narrative is such a departure from the first 20 minutes and it’s so unbelievably goofy that the film never gets back on track.

When the baby eventually gets hurt (because he leaves it to sleep on the very edge of his hotel bed which is just another example of a character who is not supposed to be an idiot being an idiot for the sake of the plot), Russell takes her to the hospital and the baby is mercifully taken off of his hands. This leads to the inevitable questions being asked by a couple of sassy detectives and Russell eventually skips town for his hometown of Casper, Wyoming. On the bus there, the film veers off into another wacky direction when Russell befriends an eccentric woman on her way to Denver and they bond over mustard and mayonnaise sandwiches. The scene is very strange, and it’s obviously there to do the final bit of fleshing out of Russell’s character before the finale, but no real growth ever happens and the sequence is weirdly stagnant.

Ethan Hawke is magnetic enough to keep the ship from totally capsizing, but there is just not enough going on with his character in the script to make this work. The story is so scattered that when it tries to land on a big emotional note at the end it falls flat (it’s a nice ending, but the film fails to get there in a satisfying way). There is a good idea for a movie in here but the script is such a mess it gets totally lost. There is no cohesion. For instance, why is it called Adopt a Highway? The newspaper clippings from the opening show us that teenage Russell started an Adopt a Highway program in high school, which works to show that he is a good person and his prison sentence was cruel, but that’s the only time it’s ever mentioned and doesn’t connect back to the film at large. It feels like the temporary title you give a project with the intent to change it once the project takes shape. So it’s not surprising that this film also feels like a first draft.

In theaters, on VOD and Digital HD on Friday, November 1, 2019.