Joybubbles Review: Don’t Hold the Phone for this Biopic

Joybubbles, the story of a blind telephone wunderkind, fuels a half-baked biography that never really gets inside its subject. The post Joybubbles Review: Don’t Hold the Phone for this Biopic appeared first on POV Magazine.

Joybubbles
(USA, 79 min.)
Dir. Rachael J. Morrison
Prod. Sarah Winshall, Will Butler, Annie Marr
Programme: U.S. Documentary Competition (World premiere)

Long before TikTok, Facebook, Myspace, and other social media. Before chatrooms, bulletin board systems, and dial-up modems, the world was a much bigger place. It took an effort to find community outside one’s own environment. Great expense was required to reach out to the next town, let alone to the other side of the world. From our time when instantaneous communication has essentially become commodified to the point of zero cost, it feels practically Paleolithic to look backwards six decades when a monopoly controlled the lines of voice communication and when a small fortune was required to spend more than a few minutes engaging with others from afar.

The systems behind these modern forms of telecommunication were centralized and gigantic. They were closed off from the users who simply had handsets and dials to input digits. It was a time when long distance charges would rack up and thin-papered tomes contained all the names of people with similar devices in the region. At the back of one of those books someone placed the name as Zzzzyzzerrific Funline, where user who flipped to the final page would call in and hear a presentation by a goofy man who called himself Joybubbles.

Years before, the man born Josef Engressia Jr. gained celebrity for another mode of phone fun. Gifted with perfect pitch but blind from birth, he had the almost superhuman ability to whistle in a way that mimicked the electronic signals guiding the phone system. By simply lifting the handset and providing a bird-like burst of rapidly blown noises, he could place long distance calls for free. This method could bypass what the rare and costly process to initiate conference calls with like-minded individuals, and generate other mild forms of social disruption.

Rachael J. Morrison’s film traces Joybubbles from these early years, documenting the challenges of being blind at a time when the belief that such a condition equaled severe limitation. The film spans through to Engressia’s slightly nefarious behaviour bypassing phone company policies, through to his regression to an infantilized version of himself. His role as a hacker of systems is tied to the most financially successful pair associated with this process of “phone phreaking,” Apple founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. These differing trajectories are the most pointed of the film, showing how hobbyists who would eventually become billionaires have futures different to those of gifted yet troubled individuals like Joybubbles, who experienced a fate far more tragic.

Joybubbles’ story is indeed a compelling one, and beyond the technical achievements, the 15 minutes of fame, and the other aspects of his troubled life including the mental scars left from abuse, there’s much to mine. Unfortunately, while the elements are present for an evocative, engaging, and even entertaining film, Joybubbles itself feels undercooked. Much of the film is narrated by Joybubbles himself, and while some of what is shared is illuminating, other elements feel far more flaky and meandering than fascinating.

Archival material is used throughout, but the images often repeat, making the relatively brief 79 minutes feel much longer than the documentary’s actual running time. Just as the man jumped from interest to interest (a deep fascination with Holiday Inns, for example, sits beside his phone fixation), everything in the film feels as scattershot as his competing obsessions.

Essentially, there’s a great short documentary about a compelling individual buried in a slightly bloated form, one that neither grasps the man’s complexities or contradictions, nor does it dive more deeply into the community of anti-establishment hackers that he is associated with given his proclivity for phone pranks.

As a throwback to a different time, Joybubbles has moments that connect, but overall it feels like it stretches to the breaking point. If the role is to merely shine a spotlight on an otherwise forgotten individual, the movie succeeds. However, it’s too meandering and superficial to truly get to the heart of the man and his many quirks.