Uncertainty

July 4th morning on the Brooklyn Bridge. Sultry and sunny. Independence Day. A young couple, Bobby Thompson and Kate Montero (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins), drunk in love with each other, face the biggest decision of their lives. She’s pregnant and they’re not sure what they’ll do. At the center of the bridge Bobby stops, takes out a coin. “We can’t do that,” Kate takes a half-step back. Then they do. With that tossed coin, a seemingly ordinary day cleaves into two alternate realities: Bobby and Kate each take off running for a different end of the bridge, and there—on two opposing sides of the river—each impossibly finds the other. Brooklyn and Manhattan. One moment, one problem, one shared story divides into two intercut, interconnected versions of the same day. In Brooklyn’s delicate drama of life disappointments and the tenderness of difficult familial love, Bobby and Kate find a stray dog on their way to a barbeque at the home of Kate’s parents. Her sister’s dreams, her mother’s sadness; Kate navigates the fraught and intimate landscape of her own choices, guiding herself (and Bobby) through the illuminations of a day that ends with the blossom of fireworks—and bed. In Manhattan’s very different tale, the young lovers skip out on family in favor of Chinatown—and dim sum. On their way they find a lost cell phone in the back of a taxi, then suddenly find themselves lost in a story of suspense and thrills when they witness a murder and run, targets, now, of a killer hell-bent on retrieving the phone. With their lives in dangers, their senses piqued, they race through the city struggling to solve a mystery that seems to have no answer. A summer day. A single question exploding into two scenarios about infinite possibility, the consequences of choice, and the significance of pure accident.