My preferred vacation option has always been the aimless domestic auto tour. Nothing else delivers so much illuminating spectacle on a book critic’s budget. There’s no need to schedule your arrival in a city to coincide with a concert, museum exhibition, or baseball game. If you’re traveling alone, you’ll get more than enough entertainment out of the people who buttonhole you, like the Ancient Mariner by way of Charles Portis, to retail their triumphs and tragedies in unsolicited and, God willing, inappropriate detail. Occasionally, these people will be veterans.
There was the Sgt. Rock in gym shorts and shower slides, sunburned to a pomegranate rind, who caught me watching him berate tourists on the Vegas strip. The guy at the bar in Philadelphia who delivered a moving speech, in the presence of his girlfriend and her sister, about how he hoped to encourage at-risk children like he’d been to join the service and stay off the streets. Once the women had ambled out of earshot, he fixed me with wild eyes: “F— all that. I’m about the guns, the bombs, explosions, and s—. Ain’t nothin’ else come close.”
I was pleased, back in 2018, to hear this kind of raw, suppurating, slightly unhinged voice in Nico Walker’s Cherry, which is now a middling and morally confused film by the brothers Anthony and Joe Russo. It’s not that I believe it’s the authentic voice of warfare, a retort the infernal heat of which yields writers as varied in style and temperament as William T. Sherman, Siegfried Sassoon, Ernst Junger, Paul Fussell, and Joseph Heller. It’s that the book, by an Army medic-turned-opioid addict and convicted bank robber, is a voice of warfare that rarely reaches the public except by the imaginative alchemy of a more polished artist.
A writer even a few swipes of the rag less polished than Walker would have trouble finding a publisher. Before joining the Army, he dropped out of a Jesuit college in Ohio. He wrote his manuscript in prison. It was midwifed into a book by Matthew Johnson of Tyrant Books. “The world will call Nico Walker many things,” runs one blurb, “but they’re all f—ing lies. … He is one of the best writers alive.” Profanity in a blurb usually means that the writer under review has tried to seem rough and edgy and that the blurb writer has bought it and is anxious to follow suit. The result is about as “cool” as your teenage cousin recommending his favorite Chuck Palahniuk book.
Walker is tough — he is, after all, a decorated combat medic and an ex-con — but being the real deal is no vaccine against cringe. “I’m 25 years old, and I don’t understand what it is that people do,” his surrogate says, in the book and in the movie. “The trees are nice. I don’t understand them either, but I like them.” This isn’t expert emo teenager ventriloquism. It’s how Walker sounds in interviews, too. Years in a Kentucky prison haven’t cured him of the Salingeresque moony nice-guy act. “Life’s kind of dynamic,” he recently opined to GQ. “It’s everything at once.” OK, Bueller. Forearmed with the knowledge that sentimentality does make fine camouflage for savagery, we may look past Cherry’s PR and consider honestly what it’s doing.
The movie opens in medias robbery. Our hero, “Cherry” or “Nico Walker” (Tom Holland), explains that he’s “been at this a while,” that his face is known to the police, and that “I got a lot of sadness in the face to make up for, so I gotta act like I’m crazy or people will think I’m a p—-.” He breaks the fourth wall and explains this directly to the camera, a la The Big Short (or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), an early warning that we’re meant to adopt his perspective. But beware anyone who describes the sadness in his own face. Soon, Cherry will be talking a lot of self-serving nonsense about how most people who work in banks are women, so you have to be polite. “It’s nothing personal,” he says, like so many devilishly appealing (he isn’t) cinematic bank robbers before him. Let’s put this one to bed: No bank teller has ever thought it was personal, and this reassurance doesn’t count as “polite” when you’ve just fired a couple rounds into the ceiling.
Rewind to Cherry’s aggressively average upbringing in Ohio. He attends college. He has a terrible girlfriend at another school but falls for the soft-spoken, Selena Gomez-faced Emily (Ciara Bravo) at his own. The courtship is depicted after the fashion of a YA romance, which it is. “Sometimes, I feel like love doesn’t actually exist,” Emily says. “It’s just pheromones playing tricks on people.” One ill-considered “I love you” later, Cherry is on his way to heartbreak and the recruiting station.
And thence, to boot camp and, ultimately, Iraq. This is a serviceable bit of war movie, given extra interest by the fact that we see Cherry fight and practice battlefield medicine. This makes the gore, which is ample, feel less gratuitous or exploitative: We’re learning something about how things work when you’ve got a firing range for a surgical theater. Cherry suffers a loss, too, that illustrates the essential truth that soldiers fight for each other above all. In this arena, at least, we can call him a hero. We won’t be calling him that much longer.
In the basic training and war sequences, the characters are mostly unmemorable, though it was fun to see Damon Wayans Jr. as Drill Sgt. Masters, in sly dialogue with his father’s 1995 Major Payne. In the drugs and robberies sequences, the characters become more vivid, as though Cherry were paying closer attention under the influence than under fire. There’s the odious double-Izod-wearing preppie dealer, “Pills and Coke,” played with infuriating self-satisfaction by Midsommar’s Jack Reynor; the sweet, idiotically grinning (unless hysterically sobbing) accomplice, James Lightfoot (Forrest Goodluck); the dealer of dealers, Black (Daniel R. Hill), who looks like a Carcosa meth cook. These are the bad guys we came to the crime movie to see, and from here to the end, Cherry is, in its criminal character studies, like a junior-varsity Good Time or The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
Cherry, like its source material, has a lot going for it as black comedy, as anthropological study, and as cautionary tale. But can it be read as a cautionary tale? In the first paragraph of the novel version, we find: “The pants are fucked too — cigarette burns in the crotches. All heroin chic, like I were famous already.” What’s that “already” doing there, exactly? Does Nico Walker think he’s famous for robbing banks in Cleveland? Or does he know he’ll be famous for writing about it?
If Cherry is a cautionary tale, the warnings aren’t about forever wars or PTSD or the opioid crisis. We’re saturated with those. It’s about fooling yourself. As with Emily’s “love is just pheromones,” the movie is propaganda for the folk belief that we’re all at the mercy of big, impersonal forces: biology, society, military culture, Big Pharma, whatever. Even love is outside our control, so why shouldn’t walking into a bank with a gun be?
The outstanding 2017 true crime book Ranger Games examined the case of an Army Ranger, who, under his CO’s influence, participated in a bank robbery. He drove his father’s Audi as the getaway vehicle without obscuring the license plates, and his defense was that he thought it was a training exercise. The book uncovered what any honest observer could see. He was in it for the thrill and knew what he was doing all along. He was an adult. Cherry, in similar fashion, offers the plausible rationalizations we’ve been primed to accept. It does so carefully and without sparing much thought for Walker’s victims. Whatever the merits of its storytelling or the exotic quality of its Rust Belt voice, Cherry is anything but guileless. This isn’t a redemption story. It’s image rehab.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
