By Brian Duff
One of the late Carrie Fisher’s strangest career entries is undoubtedly the little seen White Lightnin’, which tracks the deliriously weird life of Jesco White, an acclaimed Appalachian “mountain dancer” – a weird clog/tap/spiritual/moonshine devolution – well known in certain sectors along with his dancing father, D. Ray White, and his sometimes estranged wife, Norma Jean.
The trio featured in the 1991 tele-documentary, Dancing Outlaw, and Julian Nitzberg’s 2009 feature doco, The Wild And Wonderful Whites Of West Virginia. An inveterate addict and an undeniable redneck, White’s story is richly romantic and engaging, full of pseudo-fame, brushes with the law, and vast chemical abuse. White Lightnin’ director Dominic Murphy – who also helmed a doco on Chilean director and renowned nut job, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and a doco about the horror genre called Fear In The Dark – takes the petrol-huffing, insane asylum-bound Jesco White as a mere starting point, however, pushing his fictional feature film debut into heady, psychological thriller territory.
Aided by a cool, desaturated aesthetic, great music, and a terrific cast that includes newcomers, Edward Hogg and Owen Campbell (as the old and young Jesco), and familiar face Muse Watson (as D. Ray White), White Lightnin’ proves an exciting and spare 89-minute experiment, alternating between spells of relative placidity, narrated in Jesco’s distinct, marble-mouthed verbosity, and religion-infused violent psychosis, with cringing self-harm and spats of bloody revenge taking top billing. Carrie Fisher, meanwhile, is brilliant (this is arguably the actress’ last interesting, full-bodied performance in which she doesn’t play herself, or an ersatz version of herself) as Jesco’s cutely renamed wife, Priscilla.
