Lead Belly virtual screening at Panic Fest from 1 April 2025
Lead Belly, the second feature (formally subtitled ‘a nightmare’) to come from writer/director/actor/editor/composer/sound designer Stephen King Simmons, is, like his debut The Parker Sessions (2021), predicated in trauma.
Its opening – and primal – scene shows little Kyle (Bastian Jesus Carrasco Betremps) playing alone in a house’s front yard. He is doing what wanton boys do – intensifying a sun’s rays through a microscope onto a leaf, and then pouring salt on a snail, and then using pyrotechnics against snails, and finally, when the firecrackers have all been let off, getting a tin of gasoline from the garage, whose contents he pours liberally all over the footpath. With no one to stop him, he ignites the gas in an uncontrolled manner, accidentally setting fire to himself – and although it will not be till later that we learn how he came to be left unsupervised, or indeed how he was rescued, Kyle survives. He is, though, scarred by this incident, both physically with nasty burn scars down his side, and mentally with persistent night terrors.
Some time later, we see 12-year-old Kyle taking a drag from the joint that his 17-year-old brother Marcus (Liam Foehl) irresponsibly offers him. It is the mid-Nineties, and there is irresponsibility all around. For as these two boys are picked up by their estranged father Michael (Danny James) for the summer, dad first play-acts at being a kerb-crawling paedophile, and then asks them, “So, what kind of trouble are we getting into tonight?” Indeed we can see, beyond his surface charm, that Michael – constantly smoking and drinking, impulsive and overly permissive, not always consistent in providing food, and obviously unhappy in being divorced and replaced by his ex Sara (Emily Anne Ashby Martin) with a new man – is not the best of influences on his sons. Really Michael is just one of the boys, and as the three while away the time wrestling, ribbing each other and watching inappropriate horror VHSes in Michael’s ‘shithole’ of a new house, the father’s own heightened vulnerability and sense of rejection make him easily as fragile, indeed as combustible, as his youngest.
Every family has its dysfunction, but there are hints here of wider frictions and more profound problems. Michael argues unreasonably with his ex on the phone, sometimes disappears for hours leaving the boys to fend for themselves, and even brings back a toothless stranger from a bar (Jamie Lynn Bolton) to fuck loudly within earshot of his sons – and Kyle regularly sleepwalks (and sleeptalks), claims to see shadowy ghosts at night, and grows ever more ill. In fact all three of them get increasingly sick, suffering nosebleeds and hallucinations, seeing and hearing things that cannot be there (including a whispering tree voiced by Simmons) – and Marcus, for all his waywardness, is left to be the voice of reason and to play father to Kyle in Michael’s present absence. Meanwhile disorienting flashbacks and cutaways to amateurish Academy ratio videos (cooking, snuff, home movies) have a jarring, jolting effect, as though the whole film is cracking under its own seams.
Lead Belly begins with one accident, and then shows another unfolding in slow motion. Although the natures of both accidents are different, their cause is essentially the same – a cloying, damaging kind of errant patriarchy. For in this jagged, piecemeal narrative whose different parts slowly come together like a jigsaw puzzle to show a bigger picture – indeed, a (broken) family portrait – everything will ultimately make an awful sense. The title, it will turn out, is not an obscure reference to the blues and folk singer of the same name, but to something altogether less oblique, if not quite graspable until a sequence near the film’s end. For here an ever-present toxicity will eventually be literalised – even as it also darkly reflects the narcissistic, self-destructive leadership of today’s America, shanghaiing its own population and poisoning its own well. In the end, the deeply personal is also political, and this intimate tragedy – dedicated to Simmons’ brother Justin Michael Simmons (who died in 1999, when the director was 15) – also feels like an allegory of a nation currently in thrall to a desperate, dangerous manchild, and suffering a trauma from which there may be no recovery.
strap: Boys will be boys: Stephen King Simmons’ dysfunctional drama slowly reveals the toxic sickness and trauma within a broken family
© Anton Bitel
