Great offbeat comedy that cuts its own crooked trail through the 70s CB craze. It brings a loose structure and deadpan humor, but is still a friendly film full of characters who want to be heard and understood. That’s why so many of them talk on their CB radios at all hours, flirting, preaching, aggrandizing, telling stories, assuming code names.
With anonymity often comes honesty—and some people are at their most honest about who they are when they’re lying about what they are. You can’t watch this today without thinking about the internet. Different technology, same human needs and flaws.
Director Jonathan Demme, making his first “respectable” film after a few exploitation jobs for Roger Corman, passes no judgement about any of it. He loves all of these characters, even the jerks and the liars. Paul Le Mat (what the hell ever happened to him, by the way?) here may fancy himself as a clean-up man of the citizens band, tracking down and destroying the radios of those who clutter the airwaves with nonsense that interferes with emergency calls and essential road reports, but Demme and writer Paul Brickman seem happy to let all of those people sing into the night. The cast, full of cult favorites such as Candy Clark, Charles Napier, Roberts Blossom and Alix Elias, handily holds our attention.