Sundance Selects Keeps the Devil Away from ‘White Lightnin’

Ask me what the most ambitious films are of the year, and so far I might point you to Dominic Murphy’s White Lightnin’ – a crazy piece of filmmaking that merits a “genre” label of its own. The pic was a recent winner Hitchcock D’Or at the Dinard Film Festival and grabbed the headlines less than 48 hours ago for winning big at the Mumbai Film Festival. Screen Daily reports that Sundance Selects won’t leave this small in stature film orphaned in the backwoods for much longer. 

A little known fact for those interested: Vice Magazine’s founder Shane Smith and writing partner Eddy Moretti were the writers of the film and acted as executive producers on the biopic portrait which begins  deep in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia, where every man owns a gun and a moonshine still, in a battered trailer, abides living legend Jesco White, ‘the dancing outlaw’. As a boy Jesco was in and out of reform school and the insane asylum for taking drugs, stealing lighter fluid and for his wild behaviour. To keep him out of trouble, his daddy D-Ray taught him the art of mountain dancing – a frenzied version of tap dancing to wild country banjo music. After his daddy’s murder at the hands of a pair of drunken rednecks, the crazy but charismatic Jesco out on his daddy’s shoes, danced his way round the bars of the county where he met the love of his life, Cilla, who happened to be twice his age and half his height. The odd couple tried to settle down but tortured by the thought of his daddy’s killers still at large, Jesco’s demons resurfaced. This is his story.

While at Sundance, I was secretly hoping that a couple of Star Wars geek-film critics would run into the film and find out if they squirmed or ran out during the screening. Their bait in Carrie Fisher aka Princess Leia becomes all Honky Tonk like, while Edward Hogg delivers the sort of mind, body and soul all-encompassing performance that you bet that some people on set had problems distinguishing between actor and a true life nutjob. We’ll be watching out for more from Hogg and Murphy, who is currently working on an adaptation of Iain M Banks’ A Gift From The Culture.