t's 1953. Writer Tucker Harding (Matthews), just back from covering a test of the hydrogen bomb, is beginning her novel, The Sticky Fingers of Time. Before she goes out to buy coffee, her girlfriend Ofelia (Becker) hands her an envelope of desiccated fingers. On her way to the store, Tucker somehow travels to 1997, where she glimpses her sometime boyfriend, Isaac (Urbaniak), who had gone missing in 1953.
Tucker crosses paths with Drew (Zaray), a frustrated writer who, between breaking up with her boyfriend, botching a suicide attempt and losing her friend Gorge (Buck) in an X-Files-ish dentist office mishap, is having a bad day. Isaac catches up with the pair in a seedy bar, and it becomes apparent that there are many people, called "time freaks," who are crisscrossing what Isaac calls "nonlinear time." Tucker accepts this notion, as she is handed the 40-year-old cover of her as-yet-unwritten novel ... which features a likeness of Ofelia.
For unknown reasons, two "time freaks" seem to have it in for Tucker. Despite Isaac's efforts to protect her, Tucker is killed in front of Drew, an act which activates Drew's "time freak" ability so that she jumps back to 1953. Jumping from the past to the present, Drew slowly learns that Tucker's death has far-reaching implications across a number of eras. What does this have to do with that hydrogen bomb test Tucker covered? Who are the "time-freak" assassins? And what does the mysterious Ofelia have to do with these goings-on that stretch from the past, to the present, to the far future?
Time tries a filmmaker's fingers
The lows outnumber the highs of The Sticky Fingers of Time, even though some of the highs are extraordinary. The reality of sudden and involuntary time travel (shades of Asimov's Pebble in the Sky) is easy to buy; the emotional reality of the characters is not, and this erodes our ability to continue to believe the science-fictional premises of the movie. People who don't blink when handed dried human fingers, who don't yell or flinch in the face of grievous bodily injury, who seem more upset about the spilling of their coffee than they are about the spilling of someone's brains, are unreal. As a result, they make the time travel unreal.
The free-flowing possibilities of a story set in nonlinear time are wrecked by the stilted behavior of the characters. They simply show up and stand where they have to in order to force the plot forward, although they have no reason to be in these places at those particular times. If their appearances at these places in time are due to some time traveling Bill and Ted-style retro-planning, it's not made clear. It's one thing, as in Fritz Leiber's The Big Time, to have your time-travelers converge in one room; it's another when the setting is all of New York.
On the plus side, Brougher has clearly read some fine science fiction and manages to slip a few great ideas into her movie. There are nods to James Tiptree Jr. (pseud. Alice Sheldon) and quotes in tone and outlook from writers such as William S. Burroughs and Thomas M. Disch. There are moments in Sticky Fingers that recall some of the best SF writing of the "New Wave" era of the '60s. The performances are almost all quite good. With more control over the material, Brougher could have created a masterpiece.
