Homeless Tobez

Homeless Tobez, written and directed by but also starring bona-fide triple-threat Thomas Loone, tells the ultimately uplifting yet at times desolate tale of its titular character Homeless Tobez (Loone), a vagrant with not much to his name except a dream and a desperation to lift himself out of squalor and into something much more meaningful.

When we first meet Tobez sleeping rough on the ground outside a storage unit, things are looking pretty bleak; diving through bins for food, scavenging not-quite-finished cigarettes and counting meager pennies earned from passers-by which he pools together with his fellow rough-sleeper Dandy (Adam) (with Tobez clearly doing most of the heavy lifting). But despite all that, his chin is up and there’s a smile on his face because Tobez knows that soon he’ll have enough money to get that guitar he needs to make his fantasies of becoming a singer/songwriter a reality.

Homeless Tobez hits a lot of the right notes from the beginning of its thirty-six-minute runtime to the end, and that’s all down to Loone. Juggling such consuming roles as directing, writing and starring simultaneously can often be folly for some filmmakers, but not Loone, who injects each aspect with deft skill and a hundred percent care and consideration regardless of which hat they are wearing.

“You can take your croissant and shove it up your derrière”

With the script, Loone manages to weave a story full of heart, sadness, humour and earnest emotion around a believable and, despite their circumstances, a somehow relatable central figure that one can’t help but root for. At its core, Homeless Tobez is a similar tale about chasing one’s dreams against all odds and perceptions but also manages to ask some real societal questions as to the gulf between the haves and have-nots. This is personified in the other characters he encounters along the way, which work to hold up that mirror to us all, but meanders slightly and is the only real area where the film perhaps starts to lose its focus and wobbles ever so slightly.

“Dreams, they’re just not meant for everyone. Especially not losers like me”

Aesthetically, Homeless Tobez ticks all the boxes yet again, looking and sounding crisp with due care and attention taken to ensure the locations, costumes and scenarios make the film look and feel as authentic as possible. But what might be the most impressive part of Loone’s filmmaking tripartite is their own performance, which is the glue that holds everything together here. Tobez's optimistic nature is projected in full by Loone’s energised performance, but always with clear desperation hiding just behind his eyes, knowing that for him making this dream a reality really is life or death, and it’s genuinely saddening to watch the disillusionment and helplessness in Tobez grow. It truly is a nuanced performance from Loone who also happens to be a pretty good songwriter to boot, providing all of the film's music including the heart-warming closing musical number, proving there’s indeed another string to his already impressive bow, with that ending finishing it all off nicely by taking all that built-up emotion letting it swell to breaking point before its release.

Full of heart and impressive filmmaking prowess, Homeless Tobez shows Loone’s growing strength as a filmmaker and we should all be excited for what they do next.