Precedes the feature film TERRA
Lowboy Checkout follows Nick Cassava, a 17-year-old homeless teen, over the course of a single afternoon as he takes Micah, a younger boy from his group home, to a grocery store to teach him how to steal beer. Nick is street-smart, guarded, and magnetic. Micah, loud and untrained but desperate to belong, idolizes him. What begins as a simple rite of passage quickly becomes something far more volatile. The two boys move through the fluorescent aisles like performers rehearsing a dangerous routine. Nick knows the rules of this world: where cameras hide, how to move, when to disappear. Micah tries to mirror him, but his nervous energy and need for approval keep breaking the rhythm. Beneath Nick’s cool confidence is something fragile. Trauma and untreated PTSD begin to surface as intrusive flashes of sound and light, turning the store into a warped, unstable landscape where Nick is forced to confront visions of his own mortality. As Micah falters, Nick takes over the theft himself, slipping deeper into a dissociative, hallucinatory state. The store begins to close in around him: employees, customers, security, and the invisible weight of being seen. Just as Nick reaches the exit, he is confronted by his estranged mother, collapsing the boundary between his past and present. The moment fractures him. He freezes, suspended between running and staying, between who he is and who he might have been. For Micah, this is the moment he has been waiting for: a chance to be brave, to matter, to step out of Nick’s shadow and become the hero he imagines himself to be. What follows is not a triumph but a collision — between loyalty and recklessness, love and damage, childhood and the brutal speed at which it is taken away. Told through an intense, erratic visual language and an overwhelming score, Lowboy Checkout traps the audience inside Nick’s fractured perception. Sound, light, and rhythm are constantly destabilized, turning an ordinary grocery store into a psychological battleground where danger is always present and escape is never simple. The film is a raw, intimate portrait of two boys trying to survive the systems that failed them, and the impossible cost of growing up too fast.