Off the Rails

Darius McCollum is a middle-aged New York City native with Asperger's syndrome and a related compulsion: to commandeer transit vehicles such as buses and subway trains. For successive crimes impersonating transit drivers and conductors, McCollum has spent half his adult life imprisoned in institutions and facilities, sometimes spending years awaiting a trial. Filmmaker Adam Irving's Off the Rails presents McCollum as a man who can't help himself, someone the justice system has long failed to treat with necessary psychological support. Using historical reenactments, the film covers McCollum's background as a child who escaped bullying by spending his days in the subway system, memorizing each stop and every route. McCollum became so familiar to transit workers that employees would sometimes ask him for information and occasionally let him perform small tasks. At the age of 15, however, McCollum took a subway car to eight stops on its usual route and was caught, an action that he has repeated (sometimes driving a metro bus instead) some 32 times. Interviews with attorneys and psychologists here help explain McCollum's long and tangled legal path through incarceration as well as the irresistible forces that drive him, no matter the cost to his freedom. Also including comments from the well-spoken McCollum, Off the Rails tells a strange, enigmatic, and ultimately tragic tale. Highly recommended. (T. Keogh)