Highway Review

Kurt Cobain's death is the engine of this thing, and using it that way is the central miscalculation. Two Las Vegas layabouts flee a mobster's wife and drive north toward Seattle in April 1994, arriving in time for the public vigil, where the film expects a generation's grief to supply meaning the script has not produced. James Cox shoots the road in music video grammar, blown out highways and speed ramps and step printing, and the result is busy without being expressive.

Jared Leto plays Jack with a sullen minimalism that keeps sliding into nothing at all. Gyllenhaal is the only person here who seems to be enjoying himself. His Pilot is loose and motor-mouthed and genuinely funny in the long stretch with Selma Blair's Cassie, and he finds a rhythm in lines that otherwise clatter on the floor. Jeremy Piven turns up for one good scene and then evaporates. The structure is a chain of encounters with no rising pressure behind it, the pursuit from Vegas generates no threat whatsoever, and the Cobain material is handled with a solemnity the preceding hour of stoner comedy has done nothing to earn.