‘Hard Miles’ Review: Matthew Modine Stars in a Scenic Cycle Through the West
18.04.2024 - 17:51
/ variety.com
Dennis Harvey Film Critic A grueling two-pedal route to the Grand Canyon just might provide the course-correction male juvenile offenders need in “Hard Miles.” With Matthew Modine as their teacher-coach, this fact-inspired tale covers familiar redemptive sports drama terrain. But it’s traveled with affectingly understated assurance by director R.J.
Daniel Hanna (“Miss Virginia”) and a strong cast, making for a satisfying scenic ride that picked up several festival audience awards last year. In a film loosely based on the life and work of his character’s offscreen namesake, Modine plays avid cyclist Greg Townsend, welding instructor at a medium-security correctional residential school in Colorado.
That job environment is no picnic, given volatile students who can go from bantering to insults to fistfights in a flash. Plus he’s got his own demons to wrestle with — there are flashbacks to an abused childhood, and phone calls from an incarcerated brother keep urging Greg to see the dying father he’s estranged from.
Ergo he’s looking forward to two weeks’ solo vacationing on two wheels, traversing three states and 762 miles to the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately, the institution he’s employed by is under critical review by government authorities, and in sore need of good PR.
(The actual RidgeView Youth Services Center was shut down by the state in 2022, for reasons left out of Hanna and Christian Sander’s script.) Half-joking about the photogenic publicity value of “hoods in the woods,” the facility’s chief (Leslie David Baker from “The Office”) has a backpacking trip in mind for the better-behaved residents. Rather than give up his own plans entirely, Greg instead proposes taking four boys who’ve been making bicycle parts in
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