Reservation Blues

A mysterious stranger — the ghost of blues legend Robert Johnson — arrives on the Spokane Indian Reservation carrying a guitar that burns anyone who touches it. Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Victor Joseph, and Junior Polatkin form a band called Coyote Springs, believing music might be their escape from the reservation's gravitational pull of poverty, alcoholism, and despair. They gain local fame, attract two Flathead Indian sisters (Chess and Checkers Warm Water), and earn an audition with a major record label. But the guitar carries a curse, the music industry wants to package them as exotic commodities, and the reservation itself seems to punish anyone who dreams too large. The audition fails catastrophically, the band fractures, and Junior kills himself. Thomas and Chess leave the reservation together — an ambiguous ending that reads as both escape and exile.

Robert Johnson, the legendary blues guitarist who sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads, walks onto the Spokane Indian Reservation in the fictional town of Wellpinit, Washington. He is a ghost carrying a guitar that scorches the hands of anyone who tries to play it. Thomas Builds-th...