Kurt obviously yearns to reconnect with Mark, and with the past, in some way, and he's saddened and frustrated that he can't. Mark, who drives around listening to Air America as if it were the one thin remaining tether to a larger dynamic world of politics and idealism that he used to believe in, seems perpetually numb. Part of it's political -- living in a blue state (in every sense), depressed into a condition of learned helplessness by elections and events, while the impotent callers on the radio drone about the possibility of a third party and bemoan the nonexistence of a second party. But perhaps the third party weighing most heavily on Mark's mind is the one in the belly of his wife, Tanya. He's about to become a father.
Kurt (and it's OK to make the connection to another young blond man named Kurt from the Pacific Northwest) thinks of himself as a spiritual seeker, but that may be because he still smokes way more dope than any of his old friends, most of whom he's lost contact with. In one of the movie's best sly jokes -- and most telling bits of characterization -- he slips on a pair of plum-colored shorts, and his purplish wardrobe looks like cast-offs from the early-1980s Oregon ashram of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, followers of whom, Pacific Northwesterners recall, always dressed in those colors favored by their guru, who was deported from the United States for immigration fraud.
The way Kurt spins his stories, he's always going off on wilderness enlightenment retreats, and has just returned from Ashland, which he says was "amazing. Tranformative. I'm at a whole new place now, really." Both Kurt and Mark behave as if they'd had this same conversation a million times before. Kurt is a flake -- the kind of guy who sleeps on friends' couches well into his 30s or 40s -- but he's also troubled by his inability to adapt to adulthood.
What does Kurt want from Mark? Is it lost brotherhood, agape; or is there a sexual component, or does he just wish Mark could give him back the old days, and old joys, of their younger selves? Those questions, which linger long after the movie is over, make "Old Joy" unshakable.
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