Watch Johnny Berlin

JOHNNY BERLIN is a documentary portrait of Jon Hyrns (AKA Johnny Berlin), a porter aboard a luxury train, who expounds upon his life as a struggling writer while holding down a workaday job. His stories about his oddball adventures while constantly traveling and trying to maintain some semblance of a life on board the train are simultaneously hilarious and dark. While going about his business, making beds and cleaning rooms, he talks about not having a date in five years, trying to sell his liver for cash, asking his father to increase his life insurance policy so he'll get a larger inheritance, and taking a writing sabbatical in Cambodia to write about a man who decides to roll across America. The filmmaker follows his subject on a weeklong trip down the West Coast from Seattle to Los Angeles. The film is ultimately an intimate, offbeat, and humorous portrait of mid-life crisis presented as a documentary monologue. Structured like one long rambling conversation akin to Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness writing, JOHNNY BERLIN has real warmth and a style that celebrates the "everyman" and highlights the fact that poetry can exist anywhere, even in the oddest of places. R.E.M. frontman, Michael Stipe, is the film's Executive Producer.

Johnny Berlin is a 2008 comedy with a runtime of 51 minutes.