thenationofartists.com

Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek
(from the 2007 Bahamas International Film Festival)

Director: Logan Smalley
Starring: Darius Weems and friends

Darius Weems, a 15-year-old kid from Athens, Georgia, has the interests of other kids his age: video games, impressing girls, punking his friends, and MTV. He also has a ”raggely wheelchair” courtesy of his condition, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), a degenerative disease that ranks as the number one genetic killer of children in the world.

DMD confines its sufferers to a wheelchair by age 10, and claims a 100 percent fatality rate before age 30.

Having lost his brother, Mario, to the same disease, Darius Weems is not willing to wait for life to take its tragic course. Armed with a dozen of his closest friends and a temperamental RV to match his motorized chair, Darius heads West on a mission to raise awareness for his condition and to raise awareness for public accessibility for the less-abled, and determined to have his chair tricked out by MTV’s popular “Pimp My Ride,” a program as far-reaching to the folk of Darius’s world as Jerry Lewis’s telethon work is to previous generations.

Punctuated by Darius’s playful raps, this band of merry men tour America’s wonderland – New Orleans, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere – when many of them (Darius included) had never previously even left their home-county.

Darius is a happy-go-lucky kid, blessed with a hearty laugh and a humorous disposition, and it is the charm of this film and an appreciation for what these friends undertake to help, that makes this a movie that melts the heart straight out of the starting gate.

The documentary is funded by pre-sold movie credits, barbecues, smashed piggy banks and, finally, the help of United Cerebral Palsy’s campaign to raise awareness to a caregiver crisis. As Darius’s friends proceed to lift him into oceans, strap him into hot air balloons and white water rafts, and book him in for a massage at the Beverly Hills Hilton, the role of caregivers as crucial companions couldn’t have been better illustrated.

As an honest display of devotion, and treating goodness and friendship together as vital virtues, 
                                                                                                                                                  Darius Goes West deserves to travel the world.

For updates on screening times, or to buy Darius Goes West on DVD, visit www.dariusgoeswest.com
Images courtesy of Logan Smalley.