BOSTON — Shot in 12 days in Boston and on the Cape and recipient of audience awards as IFFBoston and the New Hampshire Film Festival, “How to Rob” is the gritty feature debut of Boston writer-director and Emerson graduate Peter Horgan. The film tells the story of Boston boyhood friends Jimmy Winters (Joshua Koopman) and Sean Price (Chinaza Uche). Landscapers by day, gentleman-with-a-girlfriend Sean and slob-on-his-own Jimmy are a two-man stick up crew by night.
They meet as children when Sean asks Jimmy for help against two bullies and violent Jimmy hits a couple of home runs off the bullies’ heads. In opening scenes, featuring lots of Boston and suburban-area road signs, Sean and Jimmy, who live near Quincy, stick up a drug dealer who occupies his angry mother’s basement. The team’s conversation is littered with F-bombs. Jimmy, the clown prince of the partnership, farts a lot. Sean is more thoughtful and even-tempered. But like Jimmy, Sean is accustomed to violence.
They take their orders from Ralph Judge (Kevin Nagle), who owns the Longfellow’s Pub in Yarmouth. Judge’s romantic and business partner Frankie (Vera Teixeira) wants Sean and Jimmy to settle their big bar tab. Their next job is a right-wing nut job with a stash of illegal guns. But Sean and Jimmy have a problem. Two Italian-American hit men for the Boston mob sitting in the now shuttered Domenic’s Restaurant talk about whacking a distinctive, white-and-Black stick-up team because of someone they hurt during a robbery. Sean and Jimmy’s luck might be about to run out.
