 The Last One In the film “Blue in the Face,” filmmaker Jim Jarmusch plays a man who visits the smoke shop where he's purchased cigarettes all his life for one final smoke with the shopkeep.
Though it’s a small and seemingly arbitrary thing to us as viewers, it’s clear this act is symbolic to Jarmusch’s character. He waxes philosophical on all the great packs of cigarettes he’s smoked in his life and dutifully smokes his last cigarette down to its butt. And the moment is one of the more memorable in the film. In up and coming doc maker Neal Hutcheson’s 2008 film, “The Last One” we are introduced to a man named Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton as he prepares to partake in one of his own life-long passions for the very last time the art of moonshining. In the film we follow the charismatic and cantankerous “Popcorn” through literally every step of his tried and true method of creating his home-made high-powered whiskey. And as he does so, Sutton is only too happy to take both filmmaker Hutcheson and us the lucky audience for a booze-soaked, hilarious and even occasionally profound walk down memory lane. And as “Popcorn” ticks off the list of the types of liquor he’s made over the years and all the “loving” and “fighting” that’s come along with it, we can’t help but be reminded of the other great whacked out documentary protagonist Jesco White, the star of Jacob Young’s uber-cult classic docs “The Dancing Outlaw 1 & 2.” Like Jesco, “Popcorn,” even throws a little mountain dancing our way, and though the world of Southern Applalachia that “Popcorn” calls home seems very much like a strange and alien place to us, “The Last One” beautifully allows us to not only get to know “Popcorn” a little bit, but also provides pitch-perfect context of the crumbling world that Marvin occupies and his place within it. Peppering “The Last One” with a series of interviews with “Moonshine Historians” and the ruminations of “Popcorn’s” long-time “assistant” J.B. Radar gives the film just shy of and hour-long running time—the same sort of kick and mind-bending effects that a jug of “Popcorn’s” own whiskey might cause. Fans of quirky character studies from Grey Gardens to the aforementioned “Dancing Outlaw” would do well to take note. It’s a sad addendum to this story to report that on March 16th, Mr. Sutton passed away. But as a good doc always will, “The Last One” will forever act as not only a touching eulogy to the man, but as a time capsule of his legacy and of a world some might have forgotten otherwise. “The Last One” airs all month long here on Documentary Channel. Chris Dortch II
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