In “Now! More! Yes!” director/editor Max Hey illuminates the workingman’s odyssey of Riverwest car salesmen, music video director, landlord and entrepreneurial racecounter Tim (T.W.) Hansen. Legally blind yet driving hampered vehicles and operating myriad tools, Hansen’s gift comes in the form of momentous confidence and belief in the next thing.
Hansen works for Manyo Motors throughout the early parts of the documentary; however, his employment there is tenuous at best due to spending the owner’s money buying used cars on eBay. The interviews with his boss, who can’t hide his love for Hansen, even as he despairs T.W. ‘s tendency to act and ask for permission later (or never), are fantastic.
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Hansen is a fish in water on camera, offering honest appraisals of his life’s ups and downs as his unusual business and creative decisions play out in real time. With a voice he plays like an uninvented instrument, Hansen says, “It turns out the future sucks,” while later suggesting that “the day I stop loving weird shit is the day my soul’s completely evaporated.” Throughout, he’s running wild from project to project, directing music videos for local bands, losing his job, finding a new job, chasing his tail, or perhaps being chased by his own tail until … well, I won’t spoil it for you. Let’s just say an ambulance is part of the story.
With Riverwest and various Milwaukee locals as the backdrop, despair is always lurking: Behind the drawn curtains of Hansen’s hungover mornings and his several beers later admission that “desire is a weird dead end,” an irrepressible propulsion keeps his unusual engine humming ever forward. Hansen suggests that “you cannot extract an epiphany,” which hits the rapidly escaping nail on the head.
Like Riverwest’s own energy drink-jacked Stephen Dedalus, Hansen roams the city, daring epiphany to reveal herself, wheeling, dealing, directing and occasionally destroying a Saab in the name of black and white cinematic glory. The documentary runs like a parallel brother to “American Movie,” in the way the audience longs for its subject to pull through, and not just because Mark Borchardt appears here and there to offer Hansen encouragement.
“Now! More! Yes!” is more than feel-good, it’s feel-everything; the documentary channels all that makes Riverwest the Milwaukee anomaly it has always been through one man’s story, which is really the story of all of us who struggle, fall and somehow manage to rise again.
Now! More! Yes! will play next on Wednesday, April 22, 2026 at 10:30 p.m at The Oriental. Watch the trailer here.
