Manodrome Review: John Trengove’s Unnerving Dispatch on the State of Modern Manhood

In the long cinematic tradition of men on the verge of an antisocial breakdown, Jesse Eisenberg’s Ralphie, the protagonist of writer-director John Trengove’s tightly coiled Manodrome, ranks among the most disturbing. This isn’t because the emotional, psychological, and ultimately physical damage that he unleashes in this unnerving dispatch on the state of modern manhood is so out of the ordinary for characters like him. What truly gets under your skin as the film traces Ralphie’s trajectory from lost dropout to proto-incel to human Molotov cocktail is less the transformation itself than it being so inevitable.

Recently laid off from some unspecified industrial job in a down-at-heel city in the Northeast, Ralphie scrapes together a precarious living as a ride-share driver. Like a latter-day version of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, only with father abandonment issues and less of a weaponry obsession, Ralphie watches the world from his driver’s seat and looks repulsed at what he sees.

In the opening scene, a passenger breast-feeding her baby is disgusted upon catching Frankie watching her in the mirror. She tells him to pull over and storms away, shouting “psycho!” Trengove shoots the scene with nuance, suggesting that Ralphie is unsettled by things feminine (the film’s very first shot is the baby breastfeeding) while leaving open the possibility that his reaction was more that of a typical young man with terrible impulse control. Not much further into Manodrome, it’s made far clearer that the woman had the right take. While Trengrove’s skill is apparent in the slow build of tension, it also stands out in the arguably more impressive way that he holds Ralphie’s view of the world separate from that of the film’s.

Unlike Bickle, though, Ralphie has people trying to get him back on track. His pregnant girlfriend, Sal (Odessa Young), repeatedly tries to help him find his way out of his fugue state. His buddy Jason (Philip Ettinger), who hooks Ralphie up with Percocet and designer sneakers—a combination that says volumes about Ralphie’s level of maturity—is solicitous and caring despite Ralphie’s refusal to admit vulnerability. He ignores the outreach like a sulking teenager. That is, until Jason mentions a group of men who help “guys like us.”

By that point, we’ve seen enough of Ralphie’s angry weightlifting sessions, refusal to deal with his impending fatherhood, and his resentful sense that everything in the world is arrayed against him to know the kind of forgotten-man archetype that Jason means. And those men, a cult-like group led by the quietly charismatic “Dad Dan” (Adrien Brody), want to do more than help Ralphie deal with feeling abandoned by post-industrial America.

This group isn’t interested in targeting his anger on business leaders or politicians, a la Fight Club’s Tyler Durden. Instead, the men—who are divided into a few senior “Dad” figures and a couple dozen “Sons,” which clarifies the underlying trauma that most of members are dealing with—preach a brand of separatism from society and specifically women. The filmmakers create an environment of such tactile sourness and societal collapse around the disconnected Ralphie—the dehumanizing work, the depressing discount stores—that the seeming warmth and camaraderie of Dan’s group is almost more shocking than the violence that follows.

Bunking up in Dan’s mansion, this tribe of lost boys announce the things that they as men supposedly created (including fire, it would seem) and that now “I will take it back.” In recruiting Ralphie for the group, Dan pulls him close to say that Ralphie has within him not just a “staggering beauty” but a “cataclysmic power to create and to annihilate.”

The cosmic joke behind this misogynist posturing is that for all Ralphie’s seeming belief that he’s been cheated by life, it’s unclear what he has to offer. His days are spent raging in mostly incoherent but occasionally violent ways about things outside his control, picking fights in the gym or lashing out at Sal as she begins to pull away from this darkening stranger. Ralphie’s outbursts often have a psychosexual component that becomes more pronounced throughout the film (men who are or who even might be gay are a trigger). As he spins out, Ralphie focuses on things within his small circle of control, like his calorie intake or withholding communication.

Though this wannabe gym rat character would seem to be a departure from Eisenberg’s more cerebral stock in trade, his distressed thoughtfulness proves a good match for Ralphie’s deep repression and blistering ruptures of anxiety throughout Manodrome. In some ways, though, the film’s standout performance is Brody. He brings a seductive and even possibly caring quality to Dan that gives him a depth of personhood which a damaged man-child like Ralphie lacks. It turns out that the leader may not be the most dangerous member of this cult.