Cyrill Lachauer’s Slack : Film Review and Exclusive Interview with Photographer Mike Brodie
An American Portrait
Slack
a film by Cyrill Lachauer
starring: Mike Brodie and Mia Justice Smith
produced by Sammlung Goetz
co-produced by Flipping the Coin
and Videoart at Midnight Productions
“These people…. They’re all this close to God or death.” Mike Brodie holds up a pinched thumb and forefinger. “They’re addicted to the feeling of dying.”
Our conversation comes two days after I had the opportunity to preview Cyrill Lachauer’s film Slack, which follows the photographer Mike Brodie as he hops freight trains. Haunted by the short clips of Mike’s late girlfriend Mia Justice Smith, also known as Slack, I returned to it a night later, and found myself weeping over photos in her old Instagram accounts.
By pure Providence, Mike happened to be in Tennessee working on another project when I saw his film. We met at hole-in-the wall Headquarters Coffee in Nashville. Mike gave me a rough timeline of his life— He has train-hopped for over twenty years, but did so exclusively from about 2004-2008. The photos for his first two photo books, A period of Juvenile Prosperity (2013), and Tones of Dirt and Bone (2015), were taken during this period. He deliberately left photography in the early 2010’s to go to diesel mechanic school, which, in retrospect, was an attempt to evade his artistic vocation. His marriage and endeavor to live a more prosaic life with a regular job and a white picket fence during that time ended up falling apart.
“I didn’t even have the energy to fight for the house I built, the land, I left with nothing.”
In 2021, his life a mess, he returned to train-hopping and trucking in earnest, and started taking photos again. Most of the photographs in his most recent book, Failing (2024), are from this time period and the quiet years of work and marriage that came before.
When Mike met director Cyrill Lachauer in 2022 after Mia’s death, the two originally intended to make an experimental film about Mike Brodie’s photography and the modern train-hopping lifestyle. But as they began to construct the film, Mike’s conviction that he needed to honor Mia’s life grew. Slack morphed into a shrine built onto a dreamscape. Between stunning footage of the American landscape and interviews with Mike’s companions, we see short clips of Mia’s life as well. Although the film does not tell her story, her spirit gives life to Slack in a way that unifies.
Slack opens with an epigraph from Mia’s mother:
“To my sun chaser, my wind rider, my babygirl.
I am still right here waiting for you, for each and every return.”
Cut to iPhone footage of Mia doing her makeup on a freight train. We see her worn and dirty hands, the tattoos on her knuckles, lips, forehead. An interview she gave at Mike’s request before her death plays. “My purpose isn’t tangible,” she says, “it’s an experience for other people… at my cost.” A lot of the film rests on this, on a girl who lost everything chasing experiences, a mother still waiting at home. The American flag ripples in the summer wind, and then we are introduced to Mike, diligently scraping a silver spoon off of the asphalt.
We meet Drew (@beatyokids), Mike’s travel companion who wrote the original song “The Ballad of Mike Brodie” for the film. In several scenes we see him playing his guitar. Mike says they travel well together because they can just sit in silence without needing to talk. Drew tells us in his interview that he started hopping trains because he saw Mike’s photos on Tumblr when he was in high school. We also meet Willow (@sweetfeengees), who says train-hopping “isn’t as nice as it looks on camera.” Among these regulars we are briefly introduced to a motley crew of eccentrics, many of whom use train-hopping as a lifestyle pretense for addiction. Mia was one of these— Mike picked her and her friend up in his truck for a ride to Portland after they had been picking marijuana in California. “I didn’t know she was a junkie, I didn’t know she was dealing with all of this stuff, thinking she was queer, and all of that typical American family bullshit, before I fell in love with her. So by the time I found out, it was too late for me, I thought I could fix her,” Mike says. We see Mia strangling her arm with a usb cord, we see content that she made—presumably for a paying male customer— juxtaposed against Cyrill’s soft film of Mike looking out from a freight car over the rolling American landscape. The gentleness with which Cyrill captures that great expanse is reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s Mirror.
While Cyrill’s manner seems detached from making explicit attempts at drawing the viewer in, Moritz Stumms’ soundtrack is dystopian and mechanical, building tension over the long, wide shots of the tranquil countryside. Cyrill’s direction allows the viewer ample time to reflect and relax into the scenery, but the sound reminds us— this lifestyle is not for the faint of heart. The sound of the railroad, that first industrial form of travel, is a sound upon which grand visions of a future were built, but Cyrill manages to capture the railroad without nostalgia or sentimentality. His eye, though using an analog medium, is trained for the present moment. This renders the viewer calm and thoughtful, receptive to what the train riders seek. The film is so gestural it appears almost as if in watercolor, and there is one particularly stunning scene of Mike walking along the road in a small town. He seems to appear straight out of the horizon in the manner that would typically introduce a victor, and yet the scene is one of humility. All of this lends to the sense of being outside of time, as if we are watching someone’s memories. Which, we are. Memories of life with Mia.
In Willow’s interview, she echoes Mia’s philosophy. “Life is just made up of a collection of experiences. You know some people who ride the trains, they ride it until they die. Even if they began riding the trains searching for something I don’t think they ever fucking find it. Because that train leads you nowhere.” The rhythmic rumble of the wheels against steel tracks swells up as if from the underworld, a metronome counting the beats to impending doom. If life is a collection of experiences, death is the paragon.
More than a biopic, Slack is a tale of two paths; one leads to life, the other to hopelessness, addiction, and death. Somehow Mike is given the grace to find his purpose on the trains. He struggles with the universal cry “why me?” when so many others boarded a train searching for purpose and found only death. Mia’s death by fentanyl overdose— a death that Mike experienced as a suicide— also took their unborn child. Over an old iPhone video of Mia, her head poking over the top of a freight car, her hair in the wind, we hear her recount that riding a train for the first time was euphoric, to the point of quitting her heroin habit that very next day. She says being on the train “was like this feeling of hope that I’d never felt before, hope for whatever happens next, and you don’t give a shit about what the fuck is about to happen next.” But throughout the film Cyrill’s camera delicately draws out the inherent contradiction. How can you feel hope if you consider your life worthless, if it is just a collection of experiences? How can you feel hope if you don’t care about the future?
I ask Mike if his epiphany at the end was sincere. “Yes,” he says. He and his girlfriend are getting baptized this month at an Eastern Orthodox Church in their town. At one point in the film, Mike insists he isn’t on the road merely to take exotic photographs of addicts, vagabonds, and eccentrics. “I’m photographing my life, I’m photographing myself, almost to the point that I’m creating the circumstances.” When Mike’s path crossed Mia’s, it became apparent that like so many others he had met in this lifestyle, Mia desired death. But of all the people he met who had died, she was different. Her life awakened something within him. Her life gave purpose to his photography and a genuine love for the people whose stories he feels called to tell. Mia’s memory will not end with Slack.
Mike says he was drawn to Christianity because he knows intimately the ephemeral nature of human existence (one of Mia’s instagram handles was @ethereal.wraith). I ask if the necessity of our prayers for departed souls holds any importance to him. Mike nods. “Nothing is a coincidence,” he says. He shows me a picture of Jesus on his phone background, I pull one out of my wallet. It says “all feelings of worthlessness, I surrender to You, O Jesus.”