“With a dry wit and self-effacing humor, as well as an endearing eccentricity, Jon Hyrns gives voice to his life and dreams in Dominic J. DeJoseph’s hour-long documentary, narrating a journey that traverses much of the West Coast by 1930’s Pullman car. The camera is silent witness to a monologue delivered by 40-something Hyrns, whose job as a porter on a dying breed of luxury train endowed him with his nickname, Johnny Berlin. A sad-eyed wanderer with a quick tongue, who counts punk rock and pilgrimage among his main influences, Johnny still hasn’t figured out what to do with his life. In trying to do so, however, he has managed to do quite a bit, which he describes as he goes about his never-ending tasks of changing sheets and battling dust. Johnny is engaging on just about any topic, from his love for strawberry milk to his somewhat-lacking love life, and his tales of get-rich-quick schemes are particularly hilarious: a deadpan Johnny details the slightly morbid story of once trying to increase his father’s life insurance plan to garner himself a more robust inheritance.

With big dreams of finishing his novel about a man who decides to roll across the United States, Johnny is a gravel-voiced, diamond-in-the-rough character, assuming literary proportions of his own. The low-fi, talking-head documentary style of the piece allows the charismatic, melancholy central figure to take center stage.

JOHNNY BERLIN PART 2: NOTES FROM THE DUMPSTER, picks up right where the original JOHNNY BERLIN left off, right after the wannabe novelist’s tour of duty as a porter aboard a luxury train ended. In the first movie, Johnny talks about wanting to go on a “writing sabbatical” to Cambodia, where he is sure he can live cheaply for months and have time to write his unfinished novel about a man who rolls across America. In JOHNNY BERLIN PART 2, we find Johnny lying in a hotel room bed, talking about how he gambled away almost all of the money he had saved for his trip while working on the train, and thus ended up destitute in Phnom Penh where he had visions of jumping off of a bridge into the Mekong River.