Director: Chris Pine
Chris Pine steps behind the camera and in front of it for Poolman, a shaggy Los Angeles comedy-mystery that trades car chases for pool chemicals and city council meetings.
What is Poolman about?
Darren Barrenman is content with a small life: he maintains the pool at the Tahitian Tiki apartments, attends every civic hearing that touches his beloved city, and films a public-access show with his best friend. That routine cracks open when a mysterious woman drags him into a scheme involving water rights, a missing person, and a cast of Los Angeles eccentrics who all seem to know more than they're saying. Rather than play the intrigue straight, the film leans into Darren's stubborn cheerfulness as its engine, watching an ordinary man wander into a plot that keeps outpacing his understanding of it. Old noir tropes get filtered through sunbaked civic pride and community-board bureaucracy, so the mystery feels less like a thriller and more like a fond, slightly absurd love letter to the people who show up to every neighborhood meeting.
Cast & crew
Pine directs himself in the lead and surrounds Darren with a deep supporting bench: Annette Bening, Danny DeVito, Jennifer Jason Leigh, DeWanda Wise, Stephen Tobolowsky, Clancy Brown, and John Ortiz all get room to needle and charm in scenes built around civic dysfunction and dry one-liners.
Context & significance
Poolman (2024) is a Comedy-Mystery running 100 minutes, produced in the United States and marking Pine's feature directorial debut. It sits alongside a small run of star-directed comedies that use a real city's institutions and eccentrics as both backdrop and punchline.
Where & how to watch
Poolman streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow Darren's civic misadventures without subtitles. The film's page here is free to browse; watching it requires only a K-Time account login, no separate purchase, inside an interface built for the Iranian diaspora.