A down on his luck ex-con returns to New York where he must face the harsh reality of everyday life and the people who haunt him from his past.
Max Lyons (Denny Dale Bess) is fresh out of prison and the first stop in his recovery is to a shabby hotel room that his close friend Ziggy (Don Striano) manages. While he attempts to make it his new home, Ziggy reminds him of one rule and that is to stay out of trouble. While Max wants to do this, he is still fighting his past demons while readjusting and trying to find some type of work that will lead him back to a normal life. He soon meets Mona (Sayra Player), a college student who is renting the room next door and in between studying, she finds a way to motivate Max and encourage him to do the best he can with what he has.
When Mona catches up on studying, Max finds that they have compatible personalities, and she gives him a new reason to smile while giving him the support he needs to get through the rough patches of recovery. The biggest obstacle Max has to overcome is that he swindled a powerful drug lord name Lucius Jones (Mark Borkowski) out of several thousand dollars and Lucious wants his money back. As Max and Sara’s relationship heats up, Max is determined to find a way to settle the score with his enemies and remain unscathed.
In the end, when it appears that Max has exhausted all his resources with clean living and he still can’t get ahead, he almost loses his life before he realizes that he must work smarter to stay alive and to be able to be the man that Sara needs him to be. This film, by director E.B. Hughes, is slow-moving throughout, yet builds itself incrementally with the power of determination. Denny Dale Bess plays an excellent role of a man in recovery trying to build the most out of the life he has left without having to start back over more than once, and Sayra Player is a breath of fresh air as the whimsical college student who makes a bigger impression than she ever could have imagined just by being herself. “The Long Way Back” has many twists and turns yet stays on track with the goal of reaching freedom beyond guilt.
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