Movie Review: 'Last Night in Rozzie'

Last Night in Rozzie is a complicated story about relationships. From friendships to marriages to parent and child relationships, Last Night in Rozzie has a lot of different types of relationship dramas to navigate around. The film stars Neil Brown Jr as Ronnie Russo, a kid from Rozzie, a suburb of Boston, real name Roslindale. Ronnie Russo is a rare Rozzie success story in that he made it out of the lower middle class suburb and made something of himself in the big city.

Now working as a highly paid attorney, Ronnie finds himself dragged back to Rozzie when an old friend, Joey Donovan (Jeremy Sisto), reaches out from the past. Ronnie and Joey have a long and complicated history. Ronnie was there on the night that Joey finally fought back against his drunken father and the father ended up dead. Joey ended up in Juvenile Detention and covered for Ronnie by saying Ronnie wasn’t there.

Joey did this in hope that Ronnie’s baseball talent might help him make it big one day, in the majors, and then Joey would have a friend in the majors. Things didn’t work out that way. Ronnie drifted away from baseball and away from Joey, never contacting his friend while he was in Juvenile Detention and moving away from Rozzie to go to college and go to work. Since the two last spoke, a whole lot of things have changed.

For one, Joey fell in love and married the girl that Ronnie grew up having a crush on. Pattie Berry (Nicky Whelan) could be called the one who got away from Ronnie except that he never had the courage to ask her out. When Joey came out of Juvenile Detention, he connected with Pattie and was not afraid to pursue her. The two got married and had a child together before Joey’s drinking and fast living finally caught up with him. The marriage ended badly.

So, now Joey is dying, he’s got days left and he’s in the hospital. Joey has reached out to Ronnie in hopes of guilting his former friend into contacting Pattie and seeing if she will bring their son to see him one more time before he dies. Ronnie is not interested in doing this at all but feeling guilty about their past, how he abandoned Joey to Juvenile Detention, and the fact that the man is dying, causes him to give in and make contact.

You will need to see the movie to see how badly Ronnie goes about this task. Last Night in Rozzie was written by Ryan McDonough and directed by Sean Gannett and it is a delicate drama about the way the past is tied to the present and how feelings of loyalty and guilt formed decades ago can still have the power to call us back to our past. I think most people have a friend like Joey, a specter of our past who is capable of drawing us back into our memory almost against our will.

Time travel is possible in a way, via our memories, especially the ones we share with others. Shared traumatic experiences especially can feel like time travel for how immediate and all encompassing the memory can feel when it is triggered. Ronnie and Joey have one particular shared traumatic experience that Ronnie has tried to forget about and Joey, though he doesn’t initially aim to use the memory as a weapon against Ronnie, can’t help himself from using it as he draws closer to death.

Nicky Whelan is caught in the middle. She doesn’t know much about their shared trauma. She’s dealing with the fact that Ronnie lies to her when he first sees her. He says that he is back in town to see his mother and not Joey. He tries to casually mention that Joey is in the hospital and as it goes along, his lies become obvious and Pattie is forced to relay her own traumatic experience with Joey to finally make Ronnie understand why she is opposed to going to see him.

Last Night in Rozzie is a well intended drama with three terrific performances and complex emotions at play throughout. If I have an issue with the movie it is a subplot about Ronnie’s job. He has a big case coming up and his assistant is calling him and his assistant is calling him incessantly and he’s ignoring the calls and it gets tedious watching the same conversation unfold each time he gives in and answers his phone. That aspect has nothing to do with the rest of the story, it’s just a hurdle thrown into to create a little extra drama to pad the run time, or, at least, that’s how it plays if not how it was intended.

Last Night in Rozzie is available for streaming rental as of September 17th, 2021.