ALL I’VE GOT & THEN SOME

Comedy has a dark underbelly. But I guess that’s an old story.

Still, that notion has achieved its refrain in Hollywood’s current environs. Many well-established, A-List comics have come out of the woodwork to speak on their sinister relationships to the industry. Bill Hader and Jenny Slate have clinically awful stage fright. John Mulaney was battling substance abuse disorder throughout his tenure on Saturday Night Live and through his first few tours. Comedy, to say the least, was a site of excavation during the Me Too movement.

“Funny,” as it turns out, does not come easy.

But All I’ve Got & Then Some, playing this Saturday at the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival, plays within the less trafficked annals of that phenomenon—meaning, the further reaches of that aforementioned misery that a comic must endure before he earns his Netflix special; before the comedienne is a marquee name.

The movie follows Rasheed (based on the “true events” of Rasheed Stephens’ life, who co-directed the feature with Tehben Dean) as he struggles to make it as a stand-up in those grittier parts of LA we don’t often see on the silver screen. He moonlights as a fatally optimistic Uber driver, and lives out of the car from which he works. The story’s scope extends the length of one day, with Rasheed’s first paid gig serving as the climax and his taking to an aspiring pop singer as a worthy, romantic subplot. 

Throughout the film are interjections of Rasheed being interviewed by the documentary crew, and it’s unclear whether Rasheed is speaking from the point of view of his character, from his lived experience, or some conflation of the two. Regardless, the point of the movie is pretty well summed in the following soundbite from the comic of the hour:

“Stand-up comedy is one of the hardest art forms on planet earth. It’s the only art form where I need an instant response … Comedy. I need you to be attentive. To respond, and respond with laughter. Two of the biggest fears in the world are people dying and public speaking. Comedy is both of those things engulfed in one. Comedy is public speaking plus ‘I need instant laughter.’ If not, then I die.”

The film’s stakes, then, are of a degree unique to Hollywood: how far, and for how long, will a performer go to make it in Tinseltown? How far will he go to make it in that industry and place, one and the same, indifferent to his living or dying?

Aesthetically, the film is rough-hewn. It is not the over-saturated, palm frond fare of most of the coming-of-fame Hollywood Handjobs that we’re familiar with in the genre. Rather, All I’ve Got & Then Some deals in muted colors and the liminal spaces confined by Angeleno stucco. There are scenes, rather, of Rasheed getting a handjob by his prostitute/friend/Driving-Miss-Daisy counterpart, Rose (Avise Parsons) on a side street in his Hyundai Sonata, before dipping his toothbrush in a bottle of mouthwash, absent a sink, to begin the day. Many of the film’s scenes, you might notice, were shot in stairwells. There is a suspicion derived from the pacing of the film that Rasheed is on his way to something. A feeling that our protagonist is climbing imperceptibly higher, but toward what, we don’t know. It’s a struggle. It’s an upward, lonesome slog. But there, keeping company to the misery, is comedy through it all. 

I think my favorite moment in the 1 hour 19 minute runtime is when Rasheed is describing his early days in Los Angeles, for the benefit of the documenting camera. He had asked his father—who, home in Atlanta, was previously under the illusion his son was touring with Kevin Hart—to send food, money, anything to help him get by. His father says he’ll send a package. Makes good on his word. When it arrives, Rasheed discovers a box of honey and incense which his father tells him to sell. And so he does it. Sells out within the day and so lives to see another. 

It’s the idea that a real man makes his own luck. And the suggestion that the deluded man has an even easier time making it. But again, maybe that’s an old story. 

Still, good stories should be told often.

All I’ve Got & Then Some plays, via the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival, on Saturday, May 25th at 2:30 p.m. at the US Forest Service Auditorium. For the full schedule of festival events and to purchase tickets visit: https://mammothlakesfilmfestival.eventive.org/