‘One Vote’ review: The fateful 2016 election as seen from five voting stations nationwide — including Bucktown’s Club Lucky
The Chicago Italian restaurant and tavern Club Lucky, located at Wabansia and Honore in the Bucktown neighborhood, routinely makes the local list of “most unusual places to vote.”
Now its national moment has arrived, by way of a modest but winning 2018 documentary “One Vote” from first-time feature filmmaker Christine Woodhouse. Streaming starting Aug. 8 at various digital platforms, this is a stringently neutral, almost Swiss overview of the right, privilege and importance of doing your civic duty, and how it was practiced — or thwarted — in five different U.S. locales on the day of the fateful 2016 U.S. presidential election. (Some elections are more fateful than others.)
Club Lucky is reportedly the last remaining tavern in the land to serve as a polling station as a side gig. Owner Jim Higgins is shown handing out Dunkin’ Donuts on his sidewalk to voters in the wee morning hours, then checking out the marinara sauce on the stove inside. “One Vote” intercuts among this homey voting station and four more polling locales.
In Omaha’s 2nd district, billionaire Warren Buffett, the fourth-richest global citizen alive, rides a trolley bus full of working-class voters en route to the voting location. He’s shown in photo op after photo op, chatting up his fellow Omaha voters on the subject of democracy.
Woodhouse finds a key person or family to follow in each storyline. In Shepherdsville, Ky., Michael Hiser embarks on his first-ever presidental vote; he’s been in and out of the criminal justice system for most of his life, and he has been in a multi-year struggle to get off the long roll of the disenfranchised.
In Sumter, S.C., Dr. Brenda Williams comes to the aid of friends, neighbors and patients running afoul of new and vexing ID requirements. In one sequence this gospel-driven force of nature gets out the vote at the Sumter-Lee Detention Center. In striking contrast to that confined space, the bracing, wide-open skies near Paxton, Ak. serve as the backdrop for the fifth narrative.
Each presidential election, off-the-grid lodge owners Claude and Jennifer Bondy make a 68-mile (each way) trek to Paxton to exercise their voting rights. In 2016, with the film’s skeletal camera crew along for the day, they did so partway via dogsled and six dogs. Later, by car, Claude pulls the family pickup over so that son Bob can take aim at a caribou, later skinned and sectioned for the freezer back home.
I’m not sure the documentary’s better off for its near-total avoidance of any mention of the Democratic and Republican 2016 candidates (though we know which way the high-profile Democratic backer Buffett is voting). At this point in the presidency we were handed that year, I’ve come to view words such as “apolitical” or even “non-partisan” as dodgy improbabilities, and too often for the documentarian a way not forward, but sideways, or worse.
Still, “One Vote” gives every imminent 2020 voter a lot to absorb and to admire, and does so with tact and concision. As Chicago resident I envy those within Club Lucky’s precinct. But I’d be sorely tempted to put down “the red sauce” as a write-in vote come November.
3 stars (out of 4)
No MPAA rating.
Running time: 1:18
Premieres: Sat. Aug. 8 on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google and other streaming platforms.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
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