Doug (Breaking Bad’s RJ Mitte) never got a chance to go to Vegas, but serendipity finds him and his friend Stephanie (Paloma Kwiatkowski) driving to the city of sin with Scott (Ray William Johnson), the genial stranger who answers his advert for a driver. Initially stuck in the house with his widowed mother, Doug seems to crave a normal life, but to quote Scott: “The longer you focus on trying to be normal, the longer it’s going to take you to realise that nobody’s normal.”

This is at its heart a classic road trip film, with Doug taking the cue from Scott and allowing himself to escape from his self-imposed exile. It’s worth mentioning that Doug has progressive muscular dystrophy. Not because a set of muscle diseases should define a person, but because they will if you let them. Scott spends much of the film trying to wake Doug up to this fact, these moments providing even amounts of pathos and funnies (not least in a scene where Scott reels off his best paraplegic jokes and refers to Mitte as “Rollercop”).

“This place is not made for someone like you,” says Doug’s mother Allison (Daphne Zuniga). She’s talking about Vegas, but writer Michael Carnick could just as easily have been talking about society in general. RJ Mitte is a prominent public speaker on disability issues and diversity in the media, and his performance brings more nuance than other big-screen portrayals of disability. WHO’S DRIVING DOUG offers a fresh perspective on the coming-of-age genre, illustrating what Carnick describes as the “the human experiences of being a minority” with humour and authenticity, and a sensibility which never tips into the maudlin.

We hope to feature an interview with RJ Mitte later this month.

httpvh://youtu.be/FfGZlDE1ijc