No More Reason to Stay: Joel Potrykus’ 'Vulcanizadora' (2024)

An award winner at the Tribeca Film Festival, Vulcanizadora brings back familiar characters to indulge and subvert our expectations. It’s the best film yet from a director who has ranked among American indie cinema’s finest since emerging just over a decade ago.

The typical Joel Potrykus lead looks and acts the part of the stoner. Save, that is, for the fact that we never see them smoke weed. Their indulgences tend instead toward the stuff of adolescent addiction: junk food and video games. Even the vandalism and pyromania in Potrykus’ feature debut, Ape (2012) look like juvenile delinquency. We’re introduced to Trevor Newandyke (Joshua Burge) spraying what first seems like profane graffiti. F and U, we soon learn, weren’t the start of a four-letter word but a five-letter one, “funny.” Later, the struggling comedian purchases a 40-ounce malt liquor only to pour it on the ground and shoot a firework from the bottle. When a fellow down-and-outer offers him a can of beer, his quick refusal smacks more of remembered D.A.R.E. lectures than of lived experience with the bottle. Burge says leaving references to drinking and getting high out of Trevor’s act¹ was a conscious choice and names Relaxer (2018)’s Cam (David Dastmalchian) as the sole drug user in his initial trio of feature collaborations with Potrykus.²

Fans of the Michigander’s work surely recognized the names Derek and Marty in the synopsis for Vulcanizadora, Potrykus’ new feature. They’re the names worn by Potrykus and Burge in their breakout, Buzzard (2014)³. Despite the promise of familiar faces and personalities, one production still disquiets as much as the references to a “disturbing mission” with “unsettling repercussions.” How to explain the shot of Marty Jackitansky lighting a bowl?

Vulcanizadora, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June, combines elements of each previous Potrykus feature. It bests them all, however, thanks especially to everything that challenges our expectations. Long-time fans of Potrykus will find it especially rewarding. I saw a tweet the other day about how you shouldn’t discuss what you expected from a film while reviewing it. Today I plan to ignore that advice. For one, watching Potrykus’ work over the last decade has left me wildly expectant any time a new film of his makes the festival rounds. Expectations prove an important theme for both the leads of Vulcanizadora as well. Derek (Potrykus) struggles because of an inability to do what is expected of him. After failing, he resents losing the opportunity to try. Marty (Burge) feels utterly helpless because he’s taken his antisocial behavior to the extreme and done the sort of thing that was perhaps always expected of him. We gradually learn that he’s begun to act more and more like his Ape predecessor, Trevor, in the years since Buzzard.

Critics have tended to categorize each new Potrykus film as an entry in the enduring “slacker” subgenre. Early assessments of Vulcanizadora show many have yet to kick the habit. The writer-director-editor doesn’t view his stunted protagonists as slackers at all. He says he’s never even used the word and remarks that his characters are really quite ambitious. In a recent interview, he reminds audiences that Buzzard opens with Marty gaming a promotion from a bank to add a quick $50 to his checking balance. When the clerk offers vague threats, warning, “It doesn’t look good,” Burge just barely betrays his satisfaction as he responds, “It doesn’t matter.” Like the bird of the film’s title, he’ll take what he can get to survive, but he’s not above taking a little pleasure in a life of subsistence. Burge delivers the same line early on in Vulcanizadora. This time we can’t sense any hint of nose-thumbing in Marty’s words. Delivered to Derek, they evince only defeat, feelings of dread and guilt that have finally thwarted any desperate drive to scrounge up money or free food. Derek and Marty are on a mission and let’s just say “it doesn’t matter” that the former lost his keys somewhere along the way.

The fourth Potrykus and Burge collaboration opens with Marty and Derek making their way into a Michigan forest. As they tramp across the frame, viewers will recognize both characters whether or not they’ve seen Buzzard. Marty stands stick-straight and hardly seems to blink. Derek leans forward, bobs, and fidgets. Marty doesn’t look to have packed a thing. Derek totes loads of camping gear. It’s no surprise when Derek is the first to break their silence and interrupt the heavy metal soundtrack, nor when he proves the far chattier of the two throughout the early legs of their hike. Vulcanizadora’s first two thirds constitute the most extended version yet of Potrykus’ usual buddy comedy. All of his previous efforts have seen a laconic Burge (or, in the case of 2015’s The Alchemist Cookbook, Ty Hickson) play straight man to a motor-mouthed character upon whom he grudgingly comes to rely. Even Relaxer, effectively a one-man show, includes uproarious interplay between Abbie (Burge) and Dallas (Andre Hyland).Though there aren’t any lines in Vulcanizdora as funny as Hyland’s asides about nacho cheese-stained pants or C.J. Parker, Potrykus proves as deft with references to candy bars as ever.

Marty and Derek’s outing makes this the first of Potrykus’ features to take its characters this far from Grand Rapids and its adjacent towns since The Alchemist Cookbook. That film focuses on Sean (Hickson), who has retreated to an isolated trailer in a similar forest with a book of spells. A first-act sequence sees the diegetic soundtrack echo his mental state. As he waits for some chemical reaction to occur, he listens to cassettes in the kitchen. After rejecting a tape of Christmas tunes, he settles on pop-punk from the Smoking Popes. “You gotta run away,” repeats frontman Josh Caterer, validating Sean’s mission every time he says it. He could be expressing Derek and Marty’s thoughts, too. Their mostly one-sided conversations gradually clue us into the nature of their excursion. There’s no escapism in this escape.

The real-life events since Relaxer are arguably as important to Vulcanizadora as the implied events in Marty and Derek’s lives since Buzzard. For one, Potrykus has become a father. His son, Solo Potrykus, appears as Derek’s semi-estranged son, Jeremy, inviting us to read Potrykus’ genuine parental anxieties into his bumbling character’s behavior. Though Burge is predictably great as a more world-weary, almost listless Marty,⁴ Potrykus may give the film’s best performance. He finds what’s both funny and sad in Derek’s lament about missed opportunities, the wilder roads not taken before becoming a father, when he sobs, “I didn’t get a tattoo, or a quad, or a snowmachine or a jet-ski.” This monologue touches on a custody battle and sounds like nothing else in Potrykus’ oeuvre. Though fraught family dynamics are common among the director’s characters, we’re generally left to infer most of the details. Marty, for example, talks to his mom on the phone in Buzzard. That he presents both tall tales and reassurances like, “I don’t do that anymore,” suggests some unhappy memories without spilling too many details. On the press circuit for Vulcanizadora, Potrykus describes the strange sense of guilt that has coincided with parenthood, a fear that he could drop dead or wind up incarcerated at any minute. His angst and paranoia make him a welcome on-screen presence and seem to have made it impossible not to write more specific hang-ups for his characters.

After gaining and losing adult responsibilities, Derek has grown uneasily into what looks like rebellious teenaged behavior. A diversion from the central journey, what he might call a “side quest,” involves searching the woods for buried porno mags,⁵ squirreled away by the cousin of a friend. He’s also brought along plenty of booze for the trip, a jarring addition to Potrykus’ usual recipe. Calling his canteen of liquor a “Jäger Grail” and responding to a hit from the aforementioned bowl with near-disbelief reflect how recently he’s started affecting his version of grown-up living. Derek still has the childish performative streak he showed in Buzzard, subjecting Marty to a drunken rendition of Godsmack’s “Voodoo.“ He changes the lyrics, singing, “When I feel the Jäger enter my veins,” and pours a glowstick’s contents over his bare chest. The sequence showcases Potrykus’ new commitment to discomfort over disgust and recalls Derek’s efforts to liven up “The Party Zone” in Buzzard. This time around, Marty can’t muster the energy to protest, let alone put a stop to the song and dance. Maybe I sound like I’ve grown parasocially attached to fictional characters, but there’s something melancholy about seeing Derek trade Mountain Dew for Jägermeister. What’s more, Potrykus describes affection for his characters, closeness, and a certain familiarity. You imagine he’d reject calling them losers like he resists calling them slackers. “I love them all,” he has said, all but directly encouraging such attachment.

That jarring performance is just one of Vulcanizadora’s many minor-key echoes of sequences from earlier Potrykus films. Bottle rockets and other small explosives look like duds compared to Trevor’s Molotov cocktails in Ape; A “black snake” firework coils from the ground, momentarily resembling the horns or claws of some hellish beast from out of The Alchemist Cookbook before sputtering out; Derek and Marty trade basement sword-fighting for one-sided battles against trees; our leads mirthlessly gorge themselves on snack cakes and potato chips, scarcely seeming to taste their food. One of the first episodes in Marty and Derek’s trip recalls Relaxer’s videotaped stunts while making explicit reference to 1978’s Faces of Death (also shouted out on the film’s poster). “My name is Derek Skiba,” Potrykus growls into a camcorder, “and you’re watching Faces of Death. I’m about to get a bottle rocket to the face.” Marty reminds Derek that Faces of Death segments don’t open like this. The mistake betrays Derek’s increasingly labored attempt to recapture and relive the past. Perhaps he has started to confuse Faces of Death with its more jocular successor, Jackass. Filmgoers who’ve kept up with the Jackass series will have some idea of what long-time Potrykus fans will experience throughout Vulcanizadora. Familiar characters look different, even when they act in ways we should recognize. When Derek and Marty choke down Yodels or set off fireworks there’s none of the relish seen in Buzzard. It’s like an inebriated Johnny Knoxville fighting with Butterbean in a Japanese mall compared to a sober, gray-haired Knoxville resignedly stepping into the pen to face down one last bull. In Vulcanizadora, Potrykus denies us the Jackass series’ catharsis, preferring instead to make us live in the queasy anticipation and painful aftermath of jackasstic behavior.

The film’s last third plays somewhat like an inverted version of Buzzard’s back half. No longer on the lam, Marty tries desperately to put himself back in the system and pay the price his overbearing guilt says he must. Ultimately, he’s forced to retrace his steps to bring about the paradoxical ending, both life-affirming and fatalistic, we’ve come to expect from Potrykus. He even dons one of his Buzzard costumes for Vulcanizadora’s final stretch. When all hope seems lost, Marty finds the doomed salvation he’s looking for. He’s never looked so happy, at least not since we watched him devour a plate of spaghetti.

Explore Bennett Glace’s collected works on the films of Joel Potrykus

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Trevor looks disgusted when a heckler joins him on stage and tries out some material of their own, “Who’s getting drunk tonight?” Our protagonist quickly replies, “I don’t work like that” and snatches back the mic.
Those are Cam’s whippet canisters on the counter behind Abbie.
Potrykus insisted to the Tribeca audience that this isn’t a sequel to Buzzard and that viewers can go in cold.
Burge earned the Special Jury Mention for Performance in a U.S. Feature at Tribeca.
Grown adults trawling for smut in 2024 constitutes a double anachronism. It suits the milieu Potrykus has cultivated across his films. His is a world where the recognizably modern logos on soda bottles and frozen pizza boxes often provide the only evidence that we’re more than a decade into the 21st century.