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If you like a documentary to give you a glimpse up top at where things are headed, consider the first scene in the new film Off the Rails.
“Over the years, I have operated trains in the New York City subway system, Metro North, Long Island Railroad, New Jersey Transit,” Darius McCollum says in the voiceover as he’s putting on his conductors hat and New York City Transit Authority tie pin, “and yet I have never ever been an employee of any of these agencies.”
And 45 seconds into the story, which premiered this month on the Sundance Now streaming service, you’re either in or out. Be in. Off the Rails is an engaging, odd story about an engaging, odd man. He has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism whose subjects are typically highly intelligent, asocial and given to singular obsessions. McCollum more than meets that description, and he’s fascinating to watch.
McCollum has illegally driven transit trains and busses hundreds of times by his own estimate. He’s been arrested 32 times for impersonating transit personnel and putting the lives of thousands of passengers in danger, and he has spent much of his adult life in jail. He’s not a daredevil or someone who’s trying to get caught; he just likes driving trains.
His sincere demeanor will make you questions whether this is the same guy who’s been highjacking public transit vehicles since he was 15 years old. The film quickly dismisses the more obvious arcs for this kind of story — eschewing an exploration of why he does it or a slow build to some terrible consequence — and focuses on Darius McCollum as a living, breathing person who really likes trains.
McCollum grew up in Queens in the 1970s. He was a smart, affable kid who memorized the subway map and learned the lay of New York City by roaming beneath it — alone — on the subway when he was seven years old. He was uncomfortable making friends and spent a nine-month stretch of his childhood in a psychiatric hospital for symptoms of depression and hallucinations.
The more time McCollum spent in the subways, the more he got to know the conductors who drove them. He would show up like an intern and do menial tasks, and the conductors would teach him about their jobs. When the Transit Authority rejected his employment application at age 18, McCollum says, it was largely because of the negative PR associated with his arrest several years earlier for his first solo experience as a conductor. (By all accounts, he handled the train well and didn’t miss a stop.)
Off the Rails, which spent a year on the festival circuit and is making its digital premiere on Sundance Now only a month after its theatrical release, is the the first feature film for director Adam Irving, a 34-year-old TV and commercial cinematographer from Toronto. There are modern flourishes like a scene that cuts between McCollum telling a story and actors mouthing his words a la Drunk History, but Irving’s filmmaking — the framing, the pacing, the tone — is closer to Errol Morris (The Fog of War) or Davis Guggenheim (Waiting for Superman) than to Irving’s Vice-generation peers.
Irving approaches Asperger’s as a circumstance of McCallum’s life rather than as a public health issue, and he has a genuine, empathetic curiosity toward how McCallum navigates it. What happens when someone is too much of a safety risk to leave unattended but too high-functioning to be in a criminal psychiatric facility? Off the Rails follows McCollum through time — in and out of jail, on and off the subway — in search of answers.
“Trains are the only thing I have left,” McCollum says at one point. “If I can’t have trains, I might as well be back in jail.”
You’ll want to know how it all turns out.
Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.
