John-Luke Montias makes a triple-threat debut as writer, director and star of the tense urban drama Bobby G. Can't Swim. Bobby Grace (John-Luke Montias) is a small-time drug dealer who is just trying to keep himself above water, selling cocaine to a collection of losers and ne'er-do-wells in New York's Hell's Kitchen. Despite the pathetic circumstances of his life, Bobby and his pals -- girlfriend Lucy (Susan Mitchell), who makes her living as a hooker; Popeet (Norman Middleton), a blind man who
has a knack for finding salable objects, and Coco (Vincent Vega), Bobby's supplier -- are convinced that somehow their lives will get better. One day, Bobby's ship would seem to have finally come it; he meets an upscale customer who wants to buy an entire kilo of coke. The deal should earn Bobby a payday big enough to allow him to get out of dealing, but the customer demands product before payment, and when the payment doesn't arrive, Bobby's gravy train turns into an anchor threatening to take him to the bottom of the ocean. Bobby G. Can't Swim received an enthusiastic response in its screening at the 1999 Santa Barbara Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
Montias ... pumps a lot of energy into his nicely nuanced narrative and surrounds himself with a cast of quirky -- but not stereotyped -- street characters.
The movie rarely overcomes its terminal Scorsese- and Ferrara-isms, or fulfills the promise, evident in the film's early passages, that Montias might be a fine observer of local color with his own unique stories to tell.
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