Banger of an ’80s origin story

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This article was published 06/09/2024 (743 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The governor of givin’ ’er is back.

Paul Spence’s headbanger-with-a-heart-of-gold Dean Murdoch, a.k.a. the Deaner, returns to the big screen in Deaner ’89 — an origin story for the character the actor and writer first portrayed in the Canadian cult comedy classics FUBAR and FUBAR 2. (To be clear, however, Deaner ’89 is not a FUBAR movie.)

The film, which opens today, was shot in Manitoba over a whirlwind month in 2023.

“I’d heard such good things about the film and television industry (in Manitoba), that there were not only great crews but a great bastion of actors as well,” Spence says via Zoom.

He was also interested in working on a bigger project with producer Kyle Irving of Eagle Vision.

But there was another reason. In Deaner ’89, we meet a 17-year-old Dean Murdoch who — record scratch — is a suburban hockey jock growing up in Manitoba.

When his world is rocked by the arrival of a mysterious package containing the belongings of his late birth dad — including a leather jacket bearing the Métis flag — he embarks on a personal journey, discovering both heavy metal and his Métis roots.

Directed by Sam McGlynn, Deaner ’89 is a rowdy love letter to ’80s comedies to be sure, but Spence, who wrote the film in addition to starring in it, offers up a surprisingly affecting story about a kid adopted by white parents that doesn’t shy away from portrayals of anti-Indigenous racism.

Spence drew a lot of inspiration from his father’s own discovery of his Métis heritage. Telling this story in the homeland of the Red River Métis was fitting.

“The Red River Valley was where our people were from initially before the scrip sort of pushed us out of there,” he says.

“There’s a street in Winnipeg named after one of my great-great-grandfathers, Spence Street. So, there was a real connection to Winnipeg and Manitoba, so to be able to (film) it there was a real treat up and down the line.”

Spence also felt giving Deaner the origin-story treatment lent itself best to comedy.

“Where did he learn how to shotgun his first beer? Who showed him that? When did metal come into his life? People don’t burst forth from Zeus’s head like Athena, fully armoured and ready to go. They have to come from somewhere,” Spence says.

“And also setting anything in the ’80s, my ’80s — the gritty, dirty, rock-’n’-roll ’80s, small-town ’80s — that was really funny to me.”

Also funny: a coming-of-age comedy starring a 48-year-old man as a 17-year-old boy.

Spence gets an assist from some prosthetic braces and a joke at the top about his “hyperactive guyroid gland” in order to play the Deaner at 17, but to really sell it, Spence had to drop some weight.

He also watched movies with actual teenagers in them to get a sense of how they move.

“They’re always scampering about. They’re jumping on stuff, they’re hopping around. It’s like, OK, I just have to basically be like a bug on a leaf in the summertime, constantly moving from one thing to the next,” Spence says.

Will Sasso (Mad TV) plays Dean’s adoptive dad, Glen. Sasso is Spence’s elder by, oh, about eight months.

“I absolutely insisted that the person playing Dean’s dad be older than me,” Spence quips.

Their relationship is the source of tension in the film. Glen feels Dean slipping away from him. His son is discovering new identities that he knows nothing about.

The role is big and fun, but Glen is also a white adoptive parent of an Indigenous child in ’60s Scoop-era Canada. There was lots of meat on that bone for Sasso to sink his teeth into as an actor.

“I knew many people like Glen growing up in the suburbs of British Columbia myself,” Sasso says on the same Zoom call.

“Glen is in this position where it’s business as usual with him with regard to the colonialism that First Nations peoples have endured. Glen knows what he knows, and he is a product of a culture that is like, ‘Here are these kids and the MO is, they’re white now.’

“Glen is a part of that. His son is his son, and when he’s confronted with, ‘Who are we, Dad?’ he doesn’t have many answers.”

No spoilers here, but Glen has a little redemption arc of his own with Dean’s sister, Jen (Star Slade), with respect to her uncovering her own Indigenous identity — and the baby steps are the point.

“I wanted to highlight that micro decisions like that make a difference in the world, just as they did in the ’80s, as they do right now,” Spence says.

Music, obviously, plays a big part in the film — and, as it turns out, in Spence’s family, too; his uncle was an excellent fiddle player and his dad’s mother played the piano.

“Neither of them learned how to read music; they would listen to it on the radio and just play. And these are things that I only learned, like, in the last five years going back to northern Saskatchewan to hang out with my dad and his family,” he says.

“So to bring metal into it, and sort of combine that with the identity that somewhat recently came into my family — that we were Métis or have Métis roots, at any rate — that was something that was really satisfying. When my dad and I get together and we talk about what the movie is about, and when we talk about his past with rock ’n’ roll and stuff, it just makes perfect sense that the two came together in Deaner’s backstory.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com