Helmed by Irish director David Caffrey (On the Nose, Divorcing Jack) Grand Theft Parsons is a raucous but flawed drama. Taking a break from his Jackass carry-on, Johnny Knoxville gives a charismatic, nicely rounded performance as country legend Gram Parsons' road manager Phil Kaufman. After Parsons was found dead from a drug overdose in a motel room in 1973, Kaufman decided to honour his friend's wish to have his body cremated on a hill in the middle of the Joshua Tree desert. After hi-jacking the corpse with a hearse driving stoner (Michael Shannon in a brilliantly delivered performance), Kaufman begins the tricky job of actually making it to the desert before Parsons' greedy ex-girlfriend (Applegate) or his grieving father (a stoic Robert Forster) manage to catch up with him and the deceased.
While it is based on real life events, there's a certain degree of poetic licence employed in Grand Theft Parsons, with several characters and many incidents thrown in for the sake of the thrust of the narrative. Even if the material sometimes loses focus and edge, Caffrey acquits himself reasonably well. Knoxville, too, does himself the world of good with a nice performance, but Michael Shannon's stoner hearse driver whisks away every scene he's in. Okay, the mood jars uncomfortably from screwy comedy to a serious dissection of the nature of friendship and loyalty towards the finale, but there's a relentless energy at the heart of Grand Theft Parsons which makes this slight but enjoyable affair worth the effort.
