Metacritic reviews

It's here, in a keenly captured Forest Hills, Queens, land of low-lit bars and manicured lawns, that Roadie soars as a gently comic drama about living the dream - or trying to.

Michael Cuesta's perfectly-pitched indie captures the pain of arrested development with so much empathy and insight, you can't help but root for the unmoored, overgrown adolescent at its center.

A lot of what takes place in Roadie feels overly familiar, and the film could have been a wallow in pathos except for the performances, especially that of Eldard.

Roadie features some wonderfully evocative music out of its characters' collective past (local legends the Good Rats, for instance) but like Jimmy himself, it takes a bit of a push to get the picture going, which it gets, both emotionally and dramatically, thanks largely to its ensemble.

Eldard, with eyes projecting adolescent vulnerability and a body lost to awkward midlife chub, is enough to redeem Cuesta's indie commonplaces.

Soulfully directed by Michael Cuesta ("L.I.E."), Roadie is short on narrative momentum, but it's a perfectly attuned character study of this rock relic and his middle-aged sorrows.

I simultaneously want to endorse its ambition and nerve and report that it's a very mixed bag.

One problem is Jimmy and his mother's dialogue, which continues in the same clichéd vein as the opening scenes of him alone yelling and yammering into his cell.

Aside from the entertaining specificity about its setting and its protagonist's profession, Roadie is as disappointingly rote as its standard setup suggests.

A slice of slight character-driven conventionality in which directorial sensitivity and drama rooted in tense conversations and intermittent blow-ups prove incapable of imparting depth to a tale that plays like a series of simplistic stock gestures.