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Rather than a litany of cinematic influences, writer-director Jarrett Bryant kept a “pitfall” list for his Eugene-set film Maxie.
Portraying the tumultuous bond between two young, homeless addicts, Bryant says he was determined to avoid the standard movie grammar of drug use: no close-ups of needles piercing forearms, no group naps on a condemned apartment floor, no whirling overhead cinematography illustrating withdrawals.
Though he praises Gus Van Sant’s iconic Oregon street opuses (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho), Bryant’s script for Maxie grew from his own observations. Years of working as a drug and alcohol counselor in Watts and Compton in the ‘90s, plus 13 more serving clients at his downtown Eugene cellphone shop, devote30, helped Bryant capture the voices and mannerisms of addicted youth.
It’s a language of broken promises and eternal hope that tomorrow could be day one of sobriety, spoken through an abiding need for companionship. “Nobody likes to drink alone, just like nobody likes to do drugs alone,” says Bryant, whose film is now on VOD.
A Hollywood playwright and TV scribe decades before, Bryant marked his return to screenwriting with Maxie, bringing to life the title character and his girlfriend Sid on the streets of Eugene. Despite their shared tent and meth dependency, Maxie hails from a wealthy background in nearby Springfield, while Sid is from a fatherless family at a local trailer park.
“A lot of the people in relationships who’d come in [to my store] would seem diametrically opposed,” says Bryant, “But they found their way together by one commonality…the quest for drugs.”
It’s the chemistry between the two leads—local actors Miles Dixon and Liv Tavernier, who were both 19 during production—that takes the film from realistic to affecting, as the audience experiences the constant and volatile bargaining of their relationship.
Dixon impressed Bryant during auditions by bringing out Maxie’s flippancy toward his endangered existence and a twitch the young actor learned by visiting Eugene homeless encampments. Conversely, Tavernier performs with a sense of genuine but unsteady hope, capturing Sid’s struggle to connect with Maxie, despite the walls of addiction contracting around them.
Bryant says his writing prompt for Maxie, conceived in 2019, was to imagine the worst weekend of these kids’ lives. That way, even plot points that might seem like high drama—including violence and hallucinations of anonymous men in white masks—can “snowball” from reality.
“What’s fiction to us on a daily basis is very much nonfiction to them,” Bryant says. “These [hallucinations] are not fictitious goblins out there floating about. They are real [to the characters] and directed at them. My approach was to not hold back.”
The whole process of making Maxie was an act of not holding back. In the ‘90s, Bryant wrote for shows like New York Undercover and G vs E, then penned a series of spec scripts that languished. After relocating to Eugene to raise his family in 2006, he dove back into writing, hoping to sell a TV script.
“I was on the third episode, going fine. I was happy, I was getting ready to send it in, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I’m doing the exact same thing I did prior to getting out of the industry,’” he says.
From there, he pivoted, electing to make a movie on his own with the indispensable help of Eugene cinematographer Henry Huntington, who visualized the city’s eerie emptiness during the first wave of COVID-19.
Accolades for Maxie have been distinct thus far, including two acting awards from Sweden’s Luleå Film Festival and a theatrical run at Eugene’s Broadway Metro that was extended twice. Fittingly, Bryant sees the film’s greatest potential impact as being hyperlocal.
“For the young people who live here in Eugene and Springfield, I hope it will resonate when they see the bus stop their buddies hang out at…or the skatepark they may have been to the day before,” he says. “Maybe when seeing this, the decision [to use] will become difficult: ‘I don’t want to end up like that. I don’t need to be downtown.’”
SEE IT: Maxie is available for VOD rental at vimeo.com/ondemand/maxie2022/696749462. Use promo code WillametteWeek to save $1.