JOHNNY BERLIN is a documentary portrait of Jon Hyrns (AKA Johnny Berlin), a porter aboard a luxury train, who expounds upon his life as a struggling writer while holding down a workaday job. His stories about his oddball adventures while constantly traveling and trying to maintain some semblance of a life on board the train are simultaneously hilarious and dark. While going about his business, making beds and cleaning rooms, he talks about not having a date in five years, trying to sell his liver for cash, asking his father to increase his life insurance policy so he'll get a larger inheritance, and taking a writing sabbatical in Cambodia to write about a man who decides to roll across America. The filmmaker follows his subject on a weeklong trip down the West Coast from Seattle to Los Angeles. The film is ultimately an intimate, offbeat, and humorous portrait of mid-life crisis presented as a documentary monologue. Structured like one long rambling conversation akin to Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness writing, JOHNNY BERLIN has real warmth and a style that celebrates the "everyman" and highlights the fact that poetry can exist anywhere, even in the oddest of places. R.E.M. frontman, Michael Stipe, is the film's Executive Producer.