Life and Culture of New Orleans as Portrayed Through A Love Song for Bobby Long

Director Shainee Gabel's "A Love Song for Bobby Long" is not just a movie set in New Orleans; it is a movie about New Orleans. The city transcends its expected role as mere scenery to truly become a character-an entity that interacts with the cast and alters both their actions and their destinies. The film begins with the death of Lorraine Will, a promising New Orleans singer/songwriter who finally loses her long, ugly battle with drugs and alcohol. Lorraine had a daughter, Percaline, whom she was unable to care for.

Percaline grew up in Florida with her grandmother, who told her little about Lorraine except that she was a singer, a junkie and quite possibly a prostitute to sustain her habit. Percaline is consumed by feelings of bitterness and rejection from the mother who always promised to send for her, but could never stay clean long enough to fulfill that promise. Despite these emotions, upon Lorraine's death, Percaline returns to New Orleans and her mother's house. Percaline finds the dilapidated shack has been willed to herself, her mother's friend Bobby Long and his friend Lawson. Bobby is a quickly deteriorating ex-English professor who would rather examine literature than his life. He is endowed with raging alcoholism, a brilliant mind and a bitter past. Lawson is Bobby's former teaching assistant and best friend, also an alcoholic and inextricably linked to Bobby's tragic past. Lawson is also a self-deprecating writer whose nine-year project has been to write the biography of Bobby Long.