Chickie Donohue’s buddies are off fighting the war in Vietnam, but he’s a free agent.
A merchant mariner back home in Inwood, Manhattan, he carouses with friends at the local watering hole every night, then sleeps the day away.
A bartender called The Colonel sees the growing war protests and won’t stand for it — he wishes he could track down every one of those Inwood boys over in Vietnam and give them a beer.
Chickie’s ears perk up. He’ll do it.
Yes, this actually happened.
Civilian John “Chickie” Donohue, played by Zac Efron, somehow made it to Vietnam and back — even after being stranded there during the Tet Offensive in 1968 — all to deliver some brewskis to his pals overseas.
His epic adventure is told in “The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” an Apple TV+ film adaptation directed by Peter Farrelly and filmed in New Jersey (Jersey City, Newark and North Bergen) and Thailand.
The movie, streaming Friday, Sept. 30 and playing in select theaters, is based on the 2017 book “The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Memoir of Friendship, Loyalty, and War” by Donohue and Joanna Molloy.
Farrelly and screenwriter Brian Hayes Currie adapted the book. The same team — this time joined by Pete Jones — won the Oscars for best original screenplay and best picture for “Green Book,” the controversial film and another “road” movie based on a true story from the 1960s.
That’s not the only thing the two films have in common. Efron’s mustachioed Chickie traces the journey of a somewhat clueless guy who gets an education in the outside world and ends his travels changed, with some new convictions to take home to New York.
In “Green Book,” Tony Vallelonga, aka “Sopranos” actor Tony Lip, a nightclub bouncer and driver played by Viggo Mortensen, goes on a trip through the Deep South with pianist Don Shirley, played by Mahershala Ali, who won an Oscar for the role. Tony takes a similar personal journey to Chickie and learns the world is not confined to his narrow vision. His enlightenment — racism is bad, but maybe our friendship can be a beacon of hope — rings hollow as a problematic oversimplification of longstanding ills.
“Greatest Beer Run Ever” is generally meant to be a feel-good movie. But the burden of white American men having to “discover” things — again — does not feel good.
This time, it’s 1967, and it takes a two-hour ringing endorsement for Pabst Blue Ribbon for this man to make his discovery:
Maybe America is not “saving the world.”
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Bill Murray adopts a bygone Inwood accent in playing the Colonel, manning the bar at the Brass Rail Pub in North Bergen, which stands in for Doc Fiddler’s in Manhattan.
(Jersey City’s Andrew Muscato, who grew up in Basking Ridge and directed the 2021 Murray concert film “New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization,” is a producer of “The Greatest Beer Run Ever.”)
Chickie, who is former military himself (the real Chickie was a Marine), takes a cue from the Colonel. He supports American forces regardless of what’s happening and goes on to rail against the media for what he calls negative coverage.
Chickie clashes with his sister, Christine (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), who protests the war, and gets into a fight with a protester (in a scene filmed in Jersey City’s Van Vorst Park). He also carries a certain amount of guilt, knowing that the neighborhood guys are getting killed — eight lost and one, a dear buddy, missing in action. It’s the same friend he talked into going to war, the one who told him he was afraid.
Chickie is haunted by the memory of the good times they shared. It’s the urge to make more fond memories, to honor their lives, that drives him to take a job on a cargo ship bound for Panama and Vietnam. Desperate parents of soldiers ask him to pass along their love and mementos. Then there are all those people who assume he won’t actually go, so he decides to prove them wrong.
“It’s like you said,” Chickie tells his sister. “Everyone’s doing something … I’m doing nothing.”
On the ship, he works as an oiler, tasked with running the engine room.
Before he leaves, though, he asks why the vessel, loaded with 10,000 tons of ammunition, is departing from New Jersey, not New York.
“Blow up half of Manhattan if something went sideways,” a man tells him, matter-of-factly. “Jersey goes up, who’d miss it?”
Just how does Chickie manage to lug a big bag of PBR cans to individual soldiers in Vietnam — who are posted in different hard-to-reach locations — without getting caught and summarily ejected?
For one, military officers fully believe he’s CIA.
Efron — known among the “High School Musical” generation for his heartthrob status and movies like “The Greatest Showman,” “Baywatch” and “Neighbors” — does not look anything like the actual Chickie. But he is a capable, eminently watchable performer able to keep the narrative engaging. This also helps him be persuasive in selling his cover story.
Lt. Habershaw (Long Beach Island’s Matt Cook, a standout here) acts like Elvis has entered the building, and he has stars in his eyes when he asks Chickie to recommend him for the CIA.
He’s not the only one. Apparently the civilian duds, mustache and carefree attitude are able to fool a lot of people in charge, who end up helping him get where he wants to go.
Except for one actual CIA agent, who calls Chickie’s bluff.
As for the media, the ones Chickie believes to be causing harm with “negative” coverage, he gets an up-close encounter with them, too, meeting Arthur Coates, a photojournalist played by Russell Crowe. (Bernardsville’s Deanna Russo plays another war correspondent.)
“There’s a lot of wars going on in Vietnam,” Coates tells Chickie. “Most of all, the public relations one.”
The special beer emissary is just starting to open his eyes and see the reality on the ground.
Chickie ends up making a friend of sorts in Vietnam, a police officer named Hieu (Kevin K. Tran). He calls the man “Oklahoma” because he’s a fan of the 1955 movie with Gordon MacRae, who played Curly McLain.
Their encounters are fleeting, but they share information with the hope that when Hieu visits the United States one day, he’ll look Chickie up. While the intent may be some form of exchange that emphasizes shared humanity, the scenes end up coming across as facile and reductive — like a shadow of “Green Book.”
During the beer-fueled journey, Chickie travels in planes filled with bodies of soldiers.
But in reuniting with each buddy from Inwood — and somehow always having just enough beer, with more to spare — he fully commits himself to delivering a bit of warmth.
Why bring beer all that way, when there’s beer in Vietnam?
“The beer’s not the point,” Chickie says. “The point is that I’m trying to show them that somebody back home still gives a sh-t.”
Chickie does succeed in bringing some merrymaking to the soldiers. But the gesture isn’t always so well-received by everyone on his list.
One soldier puts it to him straight:
“Goddamn beer is supposed to make it all OK?”
“The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” rated R for language and some war violence, runs 2 hours and 6 minutes and is available on Apple TV+ and in select theaters.
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