A true story that follows Nashville musician Bart Bryars’s growth from a panicked “rabbit” inmate to a songwriter who developed a style of fusion music capable of circumventing prison race riots.

SYNOPSIS:

During Reagan’s “tough-on-drugs” era, US Coast Guardsman Bart Bryars (24) got busted for trafficking cocaine. He did what many terrified young men would do: he ran. After faking his death as an ice-fishing accident on Muskegon Lake. Born with the heart of a musician, Bart couldn’t Just Say No to his first drug-dealing stint, and what it could purchase—a mistake that locked him up for seven years.

Serving a sentence checkered by a continuous courtroom circus and his own inane escape attempts, Bart makes a prison odyssey that junkets him through notorious jails and penitentiaries like Mobile Metro, Jackson, and Terre Haute.

A series of bad choices becomes the driving edge in Bart’s story, and he constantly grapples with his own unpredictability and self-abasement. Think Everitt McGill on steroids in 1985; this is Bart in The Rabbit in Me. Bart’s story highlights multiple modern injustices within the American legal system while he relentlessly aims to prove why he doesn’t deserve such penal extremes.

Every one of Bart’s appeals serve only to further jam him up, but he never gives in. Yet we see that his persistence to discover his life’s purpose, write music, and return home may just keep him alive. How music defines his entire prison journey is unique—down to the final exclamation point, a clerical typo that prompts him to transfer out of a safer federal prison back to Michigan for his work release a year too early. Will his untiring and unconventional pluckiness against the next shoe to drop ultimately carry him to freedom?

THE RABBIT IN ME