Speedway Junky could have been a sweet romantic film about a lost straight boy who is saved by a young gay hustler who shows him the redeeming value of love and friendship. Or it could have been an exciting, fast-paced film set in the seedy world of Las Vegas male hustling. It tries to be both, but turns out to be neither.

Interestingly enough, my DVD-edition does not mention its director, first-timer Nikolas Perry, on the cover, but instead advertises the film’s executive producer, Gus Van Sant. It is a cunning marketing move that promises some kind of fuel-injected version of Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, but this promise is never fulfilled. While Van Sant’s romanticized tale of two male hustlers succeeded, despite its shortcomings, in presenting a moving story of the impossible love between two young men, Speedway Junky‘s bad script, unconvincing plot and ridiculous second-half plot twists drive it headlong into failure.

Johnny (Jesse Bradford) is an extremely naïve young guy who runs away from home to make his American dream come true. His destination is Charlotte, North Carolina, where he hopes to become a world champion car racer. But he needs money, and so he tries his luck in Las Vegas. Instead of getting rich, he finds himself robbed of his money and luggage, only to be left penniless on the boulevards of Las Vegas. Gay street hustler Eric (Jordan Brower) takes Johnny under his wing, and immediately falls madly in love with the naïve virgin straight boy. So far, so Showgirls.

Ironically, we never see Eric actually hustle; that job is left to the bisexual (“buy him something and he’ll have sex”) Steve, an extremely flat character played by Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who seems to have been cast merely because his being a hustler contrasts so strongly with the role that made him famous, son Randy Taylor in the sitcom "Home Improvement". But, aside from Thomas, the cast present convincing characters. Darryl Hannah shines as the junky Las Vegas dancer Veronica who functions as Eric’s surrogate mother. Tiffani-Amber Thiessen (Valerie on "Beverly Hills, 90210") gives a superb performance as the drunken bride Wilma abandoned by her hyper-masculine butch husband on her wedding night. Even Jesse Bradford’s awkward acting as straight boy Johnny, inconsistently shifting from naivety bordering on stupidity to cocksure confidence, is cute. Yet it is Jordan Brower’s laid-back portrayal of gay boy Eric, who yearns to be loved by his straight boy Johnny, which makes him the star of the film.

But the problem of Speedway Junky is not its acting, but all its clichéd plot twists, which are completely unbelievable yet at the same time annoyingly predictable. They make the story too stupid and poorly written to be bothered with, and like me you may end up entertaining yourself with the film’s first-draft inconsistencies. Although Johnny disproportionally mourns over the fact that he lost his only T-shirt (after being beaten up by Wilma’s butch husband, his T-shirt is covered with blood and vomit), and although he does not have any money to buy food, we subsequently see him wearing a different, fashionable shirt in every scene, while poor Eric is left wearing the same shirt throughout the movie. In one scene, Johnny loses his virginity to Veronica (at the request of Eric, who is shown in cross cuts hysterically crying his eyes out), while in the next, Johnny suddenly is a seasoned Las Vegas street hustler.

To avoid spoilers, and to avoid boring you, I will not describe the breathless yet mundane plot twists that pop up in the movie’s last twenty minutes. Suffice to say that threats from the Las Vegas mafia, the melodramatic choice between hustling or love, the overacted dying scene of one of the film’s main characters, and the cheap symbolism of the silver dollar, which obviously signifies the fortune of fate, figure prominently in the film’s final acts. By then I no longer cared about anything or anyone in Speedway Junky, let alone whether or not Johnny would fulfil his American dream.

Speedway Junky aims for depth and invested emotions, but just fails to deliver much of anything more than unfulfilled promises and missed opportunities.

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