By Steve Barnes
Former Francis Lewis High School student Darius McCollum has been called the best-trained driver the MTA ever had. Comfortable at the controls of both subway trains and city buses, he started out by memorizing the New York City subway map by the age of 8, and became such a well-known expert on the ins and outs of the city’s transit system that the FBI consulted with him in the days following 9/11.
But, as Adam Irving’s engrossing documentary “Off the Rails” makes clear, there was a catch. Despite all of McCollum’s expertise and skill, he was never actually an employee of the Transit Authority. Having been taken on as a mascot by several transit workers while he was still a child, he managed to find a way to get access to uniforms, badges and even keys to trains and control rooms. Not only acting the part, but looking it as well, McCollum impersonated the man he wanted to be: an MTA employee who took exceptionally good care of his passengers. His attempts to land a job with the MTA ended in failure, so his masquerade became the driving force in his life.
That masquerade, Irving’s film shows us, led McCollum several places. One of them was a status as a media figure and folk hero. “Off the Rails” is peppered with a who’s who of New York television personalities—from NY1’s Lewis Dodley to WNBC’s Chuck Scarborough—all of whom report on McCollum’s antics. In one particularly amusing scene late in the film, McCollum picks up a copy of the New York Post with his picture on the cover, and sits down on a subway train next to an unassuming passenger. When he shows the woman his picture in the paper and asks her if she recognizes the photo’s subject, she shrugs with the most blasé of expressions, as if she couldn’t possibly be bothered.
But McCollum’s escapades did not just lead to celebrity. They also landed him in prison, where he has spent over half of his adult life. McCollum has been arrested 32 times for such charges as grand larceny, possession of a forged instrument, criminal impersonation of a police officer, unauthorized use of a vehicle, and criminal possession of stolen property. Irving’s film follows him in and out of prison, charting his difficulties in dealing with a justice system that is simply incapable of dealing with the complex nature of both the man and his many serious, though victimless, crimes.
Much of that complexity comes from the root cause of McCollum’s obsession with trains and his need to keep on getting behind the controls of transit vehicles: he suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a malady generally considered to be on the “high functioning” end of the autism spectrum.
As several of the people that are spoken with in the film, including experts on autism and Asperger’s, McCollum’s psychotherapist and Sally Butler, the lawyer who eventually took on his case, agree, McCollum is in some ways a classic Asperger’s patient. The intense fascination with repetition and order, the sense of discomfort in social situations and the inability to control obsessions are all part of the classic Asperger’s profile. The inability of New York’s criminal justice system to comprehend or deal with this aspect of a prisoner’s makeup is delineated in convincing detail in “Off the Rails,” which makes a strong case for action being taken to change that situation.
But there are other ways in which McCollum is not a classic Asperger’s patient, and they are what give Irving’s film its charm and make watching it an eventually heart-breaking experience. McCollum, for all of his criminal activities, is seen as an innocent in the film. He comes across as warm, empathetic and amazingly unscarred by his long residence in the prison system. Irving highlights that innocence by using many photographs of McCollum as a child, and by illustrating many of the film’s points through the use of whimsical animated sequences.
He is also aided greatly in that quest by the other starring presence in “Off the Rails”: Elizabeth McCollum, Darius’s mother. A living, breathing definition of the word “motherly,” she shows such unadulterated love for her son, who quite obviously returns the emotion, that our sympathies cannot help but go out to both of them. They are the center of an emotionally compelling and extremely entertaining story, one that brings a complex situation to light, and spotlights a character who embodies the energy and eccentricities that make New York special.
“Off the Rails” is playing through Dec. 1 at the Metrograph Theater, at 7 Ludlow St. in lower Manhattan. It will be available for purchase and streaming in 2017. For more information and future screening dates, go to www.offth
