Bunny

“Bunny” begins with its eponymous hustler and gigolo (Mo Stark), like Richard Gere, he helpfully explains in voiceover, in the back of a cop car due to the dead body that turns up in his East Village tenement building. That sound likes a thriller, but Ben Jacobson’s film is anything but, more like a life-affirming comic potboiler. To get the body outside without drawing the attention of the neighborhood cops asking questions about the deceased’s illegally parked car, Bunny draws on the help of myriad tenants, like his best friend Dino (Jacobson), and even unexpected outsiders, such as the Orthodox Jewish Airbnb tenant (Genevieve Hudson-Price), revealing himself as the gregarious straw that stirs the whole building’s drink. No wonder his wife (Liza Colby) wants to give him a special birthday present (it is his birthday, after all): a threesome. This prospective gift and its sweet intent underlines Bunny’s lack of a proper rating in so much as it improbably blends myriad R-rated elements with a G-rated spirit.

Taking place almost entirely in and around this tenement building, moving up and down floors and from apartment to apartment, sometimes out onto the sidewalk and then back inside, Jacobson conveys “Bunny” through a handheld camera that is not like a fly on the wall but an active participant, right there in the middle of the scrum and putting us in the middle of the scrum too so that we process information at the same time as the characters. This underlines how “Bunny” shows little interest in backstory, preferring to exist in the moment, shaping its characters by how they react to unfolding events. Take Bunny’s father-in-law (Tony Drazan), who shows up to try reconcile with his daughter but then gets a little stoned and winds up coolly riding the proverbial wave, or the cop on the sidewalk (Liz Caribel Sierra), who starts off suspicious of Bunny but comes to see who he really is and what he stands for, embodying an unlikely sense of community policing.

That notion of community policing might be a fantasy gone too far for some viewers. And the truth is, even if “Bunny” does a credible job making you believe the tenants might be willing to hold their noses at a bad smell, or look the other way at some moral infraction, the dead body driving the plot forward cannot help but start to feel sort of figuratively weightless. It’s an entertaining ride throughout, don’t get me wrong, but that lack of tension prevents a true culmination, almost as if its kind heart was not quite willing to take the dark-hearted premise as far as it might go.