Two brothers living on the fringes of society travel from Boston to San Francisco to make the card for a bare-knuckle fight in Jungleland, a downbeat drama bolstered by a trio of excellent performances now streaming on Amazon Prime.
Charlie Hunnam (The Gentlemen, The Lost City of Z) is Stanley Kaminski, a street hustler deep in debt with the local mob; Jack O’Connell (Unbroken, The Man with the Iron Heart) is Lion, his brother and a talented boxer now forced to participate on the underground circuit after big bro got his license suspended for trying to bribe a judge.
Essentially homeless – the brothers crash in an abandoned house – and struggling to survive through menial jobs at a local sewing factory, Stanley leaps at a chance to repay local gangster Pepper (Jonathan Majors) — and get his brother to San Francisco in time for a bar-knuckle fight with a $100,000 prize.
The only catch: they need to drop off the mysterious Sky (Jessica Barden) with a mob boss in Reno along the way. While Stanley sees the opportunity as a way to make things right in his world, Lion knows there’s more to the story than he’s being told, and the duo are dwindling down a path of no return.
As the trio makes their way across the country, Jungleland settles into familiar road movie territory, with the relationship between the two brothers, and their secretive traveling companion, nicely detailed along the way. There’s not a whole lot of story being disseminated here, but the film shines when painting a stark portrait of young Americans struggling to get by in an unforgiving landscape.
In its road movie format, underbelly-of-America presentation, and characterization of the two leads and their relationship, Jungleland owes a lot to Jerry Schatzberg’s criminally underrated 1973 classic Scarecrow, one of the best pieces of Americana ever put to screen. It’s no coincidence that O’Connell’s character here shares the name Lion with Al Pacino in the earlier film.
But while Jungleland may not operate at the same level as Scarecrow, the two lead performances and a solid assist by Barden elevate it to something more than just watchable. You can feel the weight of the world on the shoulders of Stanley and Lion, and Hunnam and O’Connell perfectly capture their pain.
Directed by Max Winkler (Flower) from a screenplay co-written with Theodore Bressman & David Branson Smith, Jungleland doesn’t always feel as authentic as it needs to in order to truly shine; the payoff Reno scenes, in particular, feel like they came from the pen of a writer rather than the characters in the film. But Jungleland succeeds enough to warrant a watch, if only to appreciate the excellent performances at its core.
