There’s no room for dreamers in Trump’s America. No time for artists with a message to send to their fellow peers. Life is short, the wage gap is ever expanding, and an angry, highly uneducated ignoramus whose only concern is making life easier for the wealthy is in charge of our country. Who’s got time to take in art when we’re all so desperate for money? Who can spare a second to try to change the tides for a better future when we’re all so busy drowning in the mess of the current? As we struggle to stride through the muck and the mire of our current political climate, we lose ourselves in the chaos, becoming one with the madness, fervently molding ourselves into the monsters we’ve come to fear. This is the nightmare world that Tilt director Kasra Farahani wants to show you, but you’re probably not listening anyway.

America has come undone. Joe knows it, and that’s why he’s making it the focus of his new documentary titled ‘Golden Age’. The follow-up to his first pinball-centric doc called ‘Tilt’, which successfully premiered and was picked up for distribution four years ago. Although this new project started out as a film that was centered around military industrial conquests and war profiteering, over time it has evolved into a picture about the myth of the American dream, and how right-winged conservatives are fondly recalling a time (specifically the 1950s) that doesn’t exist to push capitalist propaganda onto the masses. To Joe, the “idiot conservatives” attempt to get back to “the good ol’ days” is actually antithetical to the fantastical monetarily sound world in which they hope to achieve, and is only further widening the wage gap.

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Joe’s girlfriend Joanne is worried about him. Pregnant, working long hours at the hospital and in the middle of going through med school, she’s growing aggressively more concerned about Joe’s lack of income a little bit more each day – but that’s not all. Lately, it seems as though Joe has been a little more loose around the edges. He’s gotten a bit haywire when he was deep into research mode in the past, but this is different. He’s drinking heavily, staying out all night, and throwing random erratic temper tantrums. She suspects her lover might be depressed, but little does she know, it’s so much worse than that.

See, Joe’s been following people around the neighborhood late at night. Picking fights. Dreaming about killing his unborn child. He even keeps typing some random name, “Chusuke Hasegawa” into his internet search engine – a name which eventually pops up as a missing person. Joe has been biding his time preaching to uninterested parties about their immoral behavior, but he’s so far down the rabbit hole of paranoia that he can’t even see the light at the end of the tunnel anymore. He is officially just as dormant and self-destructive as all of the people he puts down. There’s no telling what he might do next.

This horrific new vision of a time when Donald Trump is the leader of the Free World is as fiercely unnerving as it is smart and timely. Farahani has created a fascinating narrative about what it’s like to be a regular everyday Joe in an insane world run by a madman with the power to destroy us all. It’s enough to make anybody feel crazy. This movie hits extremely close to home because it so articulately capitalizes on the fear that we all feel; that sense of quiet desperation gnawing at us from inside, and swiftly exploits the terror we share to create a well thought out example of what can happen to us if we’re not careful. The far right wing may have a reputation lately for being a little cuckoo (at least when it comes to their representatives), but even those on the far left can become unhinged in their attempt to garner control over the hysteria. Joe feels helpless and alone and unheard, and he lashes out as a result of his frustration. If we’re not careful, if we let the chaos consume us, we, too, could be driven to desperate acts. Like Joe the documentarian, director Farahani is trying to warn us about what catastrophic effects could manifest as a result of our rage. But also like his leading man, his words will probably fall on deaf ears, because we’re all just trying to survive, to flourish financially in this world that keeps growing harder and harder for the poor. We probably won’t hear his message because we’re simply not paying attention.