American Beer: A Bockumentary

I wanted to like this movie. I really did. Unfortunately, the filmmakers turned it into more of a road trip movie than a beer movie. You see, the principle idea of the film is that five unemployed buddies from New York are taking a van across America in order to visit 38 micro-breweries in 40 days. This might work if they decided to use the road trip aspect to actually show America and the places where these breweries operate. Instead, the filmmakers used it as a vehicle to show themselves acting like doofuses instead. At least half the film is them in their hotel room being sick drunk or them on the road losing their luggage off the roof of their van and displaying multitudinous other forms of ineptitude. Another quarter of the movie is devoted to nonsensical montage sequences that for the most part contain no rhyme or reason. Don't get me wrong, the small portion of the film showing the actually brewery visits is extremely interesting, even if they merely show about ten of the 38 they supposedly toured. The actual process of making beer is only slightly glossed over, with the focus instead on the history of the breweries and the people who run them. These characters are the true driving force of the film, and it would have been nice to meet more of them or perhaps follow up on their stories at a later point in time. In fact, at the end of the journey, one of the five road trippers apparently decided to start home brewing his own beer and eventually opened a brewery. Following his story after the trip would have been far more interesting than watching him stress out about his weight for twelve minutes in the middle of the film. For all its faults, American Beer's heart is in the right place, as it tries to elevate the craft brew in an American consciousness that lives on Bud, Coors, and Miller. Meeting the people behind some of these true beers is worth the watch, but meeting the five filmmakers guzzling them is not. (C+)