Adventureland|Stardust Lounge — Where the Fake Rolling Stones Play

A bar out past the airport, a covers band grinding through the Rolling Stones, and Connell — the married maintenance man who tells everyone he once jammed with Lou Reed — holding court as though this were a career. The Stardust Lounge on Brodhead Road in Coraopolis supplied the room, and the production barely had to dress it.

This is the far western edge of the Pittsburgh sprawl, twenty minutes from Kennywood's opposite corner of the county, the flat commercial strip that grew up around Pittsburgh International. The Stardust is a roadhouse of the plain kind: bar along one wall, a stage barely raised, a floor that fills when a band shows up and empties when it doesn't. The film needed a place where a man in his thirties could still be the most interesting person in the room, and where a twenty-two-year-old would believe it for about an hour.

That is the joke the scene is building. Ryan Reynolds plays Connell as someone who has confused a small audience for a large one, and the venue makes the argument before the dialogue does. Nothing here is going anywhere. The band will play the same set next Friday.

It is still open, still doing late nights and theme evenings. Go on a night with live music, stand at the back, and watch how quickly the room decides who matters.

Photo: Coraopolis, Pennsylvania streetscape, Wikimedia Commons, freely licensed.