24-02-2025
'Now! More! Yes!' Endearing Film Follows a Milwaukee Used-Car Salesman
One night in early 2022, legally blind neurodivergent car salesman TW Hansen was running the used-vehicle department at a bottom-feeding Milwaukee lot when he drunkenly decided to purchase a janky 1989 Ford E350–based ambulance using his boss's money. "Remember, we're from Wisconsin," Hansen tells Car and Driver, "so casual alcoholism is invariably a part of any story."
This action wasn't quite as outlandish as it might seem. In addition to purchasing and peddling sub-$10,000 vehicles to a struggling clientele often one working car ride away from losing their jobs or their housing, he also ran an ad hoc picture-car business, renting out vehicles for local film appearances. Milwaukee isn't exactly the Hollywood of the Midwest, but Hansen had a niche: obscure period-correct vehicles from the '70s and '80s, and/or cars that could be crashed, crushed, or set aflame.
He'd had some success renting out to productions a 1983 Ford LTD police car, which he'd purchased for $2800, earning enough to nearly cover the purchase price before selling it to a collector for $6000. So, the similarly priced hospital hauler seemed marketable.
A new documentary, Now! More! Yes!, directed by fellow Milwaukeean Max Hey, shows why that mostly wasn't the case. Until it maybe sort of was.
The movie, which will premiere at the famed South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, on March 8, follows Hansen and a ragtag group of no-budget guerrilla Wisconsin filmmakers, as Hansen buys and borrows vehicles for film sets and attempts to find a home for the misfit ambulance. In the process—and this is what makes the movie such a heartfelt delight—he finds a home for his misfit self as well.
"Truth be told, the period of time that the movie covers, in 2022 and 2023, was the most harrowing year of my life,' Hansen says. "Every major component of my conception of self was tested and challenged and torn down to its foundations."
While this tension is demonstrated clearly in the film, for car lovers like us this emotional narrative is often supplemented (if not supplanted) by the onscreen vehicular one. In addition to the ambulance—which has no key, and won't start anyway—the movie delights in the destruction of automotive ephemera. A 1990s Cadillac is burned to the frame. An '80s Saab is dropped repeatedly from a crane, then strap towed around town by an Econoline van without a front fender. A Mercedes W123 sedan is driven off a cliff. A 1987 Chevy Citation coupe appears and fades, like an apparition. There is a demolition derby scene.
Hansen's personal car collection goes well beyond any oddities we see on the screen. He estimates that he has owned well over 300 cars in the three decades since he got his license. "Some are strange for what they are, and some became strange through quantity," he says. "For example, the 1987-through-1991 Toyota Camry station wagon is not necessarily an interesting car, but between my friends and I, we've owned over 20 of them. The Toyota van from that era—the toaster-shaped van before the Previa—I had, like, five of them. Renault Alliances, those I had a bunch of." Hansen's first car, the 1977 AMC Pacer Wagon? "I had a bunch of those too," he says.
Even a serial buyer (and seller) of hundreds of weirdo cars has some vehicles on his unicorn wish list. "I never had an early '80s Ford Country Squire station wagon. And I'd like a 1962 Dodge Dart, a four-door hardtop," Hansen says. "But the one I'm really into is the Renault Avantime. which was a pillarless two-door minivan. It has a deeply peculiar brutalist style. It is weird in the way that only the French can do weird."
We won't tell you what happens to Hansen's ambulance. Or to his connection with his boss and the used-car lot. ("I would characterize it as an abusive relationship," he says.) Or to any of the movies-within-the-movie that appear in brief grainy video clips. Those would be spoilers.
But we will say that the movie is transcendent, a story that results in redemption—vehicular and otherwise—and that we were cheering for the weird protagonist and his weird cars and his weird cohort the entire time.
We are not alone. "For the first time in memory, I feel like I no longer need to dwell in the labor of my own despair," Hansen says of his situation now, nearly two years after the movie's action was filmed. "My life has something resembling direction and purpose to a degree to which is a little bit frightening because I am not accustomed to direction or purpose. These are alien concepts to me."
If you're at SXSW March 8–11, definitely go see Now! More! Yes! And if you're not, watch for it at other festivals, and perhaps, hopefully soon, on some streaming service. We feel confident someone will buy it. Just like that ambulance.j
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