On The Road With Another Odd Couple, And A Body

Thelma and Louise. Sailor and Lula.

Pokey and Jackie?

Highway 61, an uneven but engagingly oddball road movie from Canada, follows the blacktop adventures of a small-town barber named Pokey Jones and a wayward roadie named Jackie Bangs as they transport a corpse from north of the border to New Orleans. A corpse stuffed with packets of illegal white powder.

Along the way they go on a hapless crime spree, meet up with various archetypal kooks and do battle with Satan. Or at least a guy who thinks he's Satan, handing out Faustian contracts to every sucker in sight. (A homeless guy who asks for change is offered $20 instead: "I want you to sign a contract that when you die your soul will be mine for all time," says Mr. Skin, a.k.a. Satan. "And you'll give me 20 bucks?" the street person responds in disbelief. "What's the catch?")

Directed by Bruce McDonald, Highway 61 is sort of Wild at Heart Lite. In that David Lynch movie, the reckless lovers Sailor and Lula tool down the highway in their vintage car, the spirit of Elvis Presley and The Wizard of Oz commingling in the exhaust fumes. In Highway 61, Pokey and Jackie steer their Galaxy 500 from the Canadian lakehead to the Big Easy, "tracing the history of popular music back to its roots." They even make a pit stop in Hibbing, Minn., childhood home of Bob Dylan, author of the classic Highway 61 Revisited.

Both pictures have wackos aplenty.

Don McKellar, who wrote the script and stars as Pokey (and who can also be seen as the young, goateed censor in Atom Egoyan's The Adjuster), has an affably flaky presence. His character is a shambling, innocent dreamer: Rob Morrow's Northern Exposure guy without the New York City anxiety levels. Valerie Buhagiar, as the duplicitous rock-and-roller, brings a deadpan manner and an atypical attractiveness to her role, although you're never really sure what this woman is about.

Which can be said for Highway 61 itself.

Pokey is timid, hesitant, living in a time-warp. Jackie is a thief apparently without conscience, a drug smuggler, a woman who thinks nothing of making love in a cemetery or stealing the life savings of a single father with three girls in tow. Each offers something the other lacks - and desires.