TREATMENT

FORMAT & TONE

Feature film. Dark comedy/character study. 125 pages.

YESSIREE BOB operates in the space between the Coen Brothers and Hamsun's Hunger — the warm, wry texture of Inside Llewyn Davis pressed against eruptions of genuinely brutal violence, all set in a rust-belt city that loves its musicians the way it loves its bridges: abstractly, from a distance, without paying for upkeep. The first act is a portrait of creative paralysis so specific it becomes universal — a woman who knows everything about music except how to make her own matter, surrounded by people who care about her in ways she can't receive. The humor is incidental and lived-in: a record store owner who measures every artist against Television, a customer looking for Joni Mitchell "but darker," a running joke about the Dave Matthews Band that never lands because nobody's telling one. The film earns its audience's investment in Bobby Ann's talent before revealing what that talent actually costs. When the violence arrives, it is not stylized. It is clumsy, desperate, and horrifying — a woman strangling a stranger in a bedroom with shaking hands, beating an old man on a sidewalk with a tire iron, garroting a friend with a guitar string. Nobody looks cool. Nobody is in control. The kills are ugly precisely because Bobby Ann is not a killer. She is a musician who has discovered that murder is the only thing that makes her music work.

The film uses a flash-forward prologue. The opening scene — Bobby Ann sitting in a kitchen with a young woman named Gigi, drinking coffee, making small talk about Dan Brown and Walgreens earrings — plays as a slice of ordinary life until Bobby Ann reaches across the table and stabs Gigi in the throat with a kitchen knife. The motion is unhurried. Deliberate. Like reaching for the salt. A title card — BEFORE — rewinds us to the beginning, and the rest of the film unfolds chronologically toward this moment. The effect is dread by design: the audience knows what Bobby Ann is capable of before they know who she is, and every scene of warmth and vulnerability that follows is shadowed by the knowledge that this woman will one day kill someone over coffee without changing her breathing. By the time we arrive back at Gigi, the audience understands exactly how Bobby Ann got here — and that understanding is the worst part.

SETTING

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The South Side — a neighborhood of rowhouses, dive bars, and record shops along East Carson Street, pressed between the Monongahela River and the hills. The city is not romanticized. It is bridges and church steeples and a river that carries bodies downstream without comment. The South Side is where musicians go when they can't afford anywhere else and stay when they can't imagine anywhere else — a few blocks of venues, bars, and shops where everyone knows everyone and nobody is making money. The Furnace is the center of Bobby Ann's world: a small venue with mismatched chairs, Christmas lights, a PA system that hums, and a chalkboard that reads "THURSDAYS — BOBBY ANN / 9 PM." Rebel Records is her day job: vinyl in milk crates, faded band posters, a turntable behind the counter playing something nobody asked for. Bobby Ann's apartment is clean but not maintained — records on shelves that bow in the middle, a four-track recorder gathering dust, a poster for a show she played four years ago with her name in small type at the bottom of a five-act bill. Dormont, where her father lives, is the Pittsburgh that exists outside the South Side — quiet, brick, aluminum awnings, chain-link fences, a neighborhood that decided what it was forty years ago and hasn't revisited the question. The geography is claustrophobic by design. Bobby Ann's entire life fits within a few square miles. The river is always nearby. It will become useful.

CHARACTERS

BOBBY ANN MCDANIEL (40): A struggling indie folk musician who discovers that killing unlocks her creative voice. Bobby Ann works at Rebel Records on Pittsburgh's South Side and plays Thursday nights at The Furnace to rooms of fifteen people who are mostly there for the drinks. She is thin, pale, with dark circles under her eyes — the look of someone who was probably striking at twenty-five and has since stopped trying to be noticed. She can tell you the producer, the label, the year, and the story behind the third track on any record in the shop. She knows more about music than anyone she's ever met, and none of that knowledge has translated into a career. She hasn't written a new song in years. Her voice has the flat, cold quality of Nico — not a deficiency but a texture, a sound that should be extraordinary and instead plays to rooms that don't listen. Bobby Ann is not a psychopath. She is not calculating or predatory. She is a woman who has been numb for so long that when violence accidentally breaks something open inside her, she chases the feeling the way an addict chases a high — not because she enjoys killing, but because she cannot survive without the music it produces. Her tragedy is that she will never understand the mechanism well enough to control it. Only unintentional, unforced kills unlock the creative engine. The moment she pursues violence deliberately, it stops working. The moment she kills the person she loves most, it stops forever.

PALOMA CASSIDY CHAVEZ (38): Bartender at The Furnace. Bobby Ann's closest relationship and unspoken love. Paloma has dark hair, sharp eyes, and the practiced ease of someone who has poured ten thousand drinks and heard every story attached to them. She moves through The Furnace the way Bobby Ann moves through Rebel Records — she knows where everything is without looking. Paloma is the only person who tells Bobby Ann the truth: that she's better than Mei Fang, that she needs to write more, that she should stop deciding things are impossible and giving up. She says these things simply, without emphasis, the way you say something you've thought a hundred times and finally decided to let out. Paloma watches Bobby Ann play the way you watch a friend tell a story you already know — with love, not suspense. She is attentive in a way that is structurally dangerous: she notices when Bobby Ann seems different, when something has shifted, when the notebooks on the desk have multiplied. Late one night, unable to sleep in Bobby Ann's apartment, she reads the notebooks. What she finds — a steel string around a throat, a body in the river, the color of someone's nails in the dark — is too precise to be lyrics. She confronts Bobby Ann. She moves for the door. She doesn't make it. Paloma's death is the film's emotional catastrophe — not because it is the most violent, but because it is the most deliberate, and because it destroys the only thing Bobby Ann was killing to protect.

MEI FANG (27): A musician who outpaced Bobby Ann. Mei is good — more than good. She plays with the ease of someone who knows the room is hers, who doesn't have to earn the silence because it was waiting for her when she walked on. Her music is in the same orbit as Bobby Ann's — indie folk, spare, lyrical — but there's a confidence in it that Bobby Ann's doesn't have. Not a better voice. Not better songs. Just a person who believes she belongs on a stage, playing for a room that agrees. Mei is genuinely kind. She listens to Bobby Ann's old EP and calls "Kitchen Light" better than anything on her own record. She offers to put Bobby Ann on a tour bill. She means it. She is not condescending; she is generous, and her generosity is unbearable because it comes from above. Mei functions as Bobby Ann's mirror — the version of herself that worked out, the proof that talent alone is not enough, and that the difference between them may be nothing more than luck and timing. She returns to Rebel Records after closing to retrieve forgotten sunglasses and is killed with a guitar string. Her body is dumped in the Monongahela.

DETECTIVE DARIO AGAPETO FERRARI (57): A plainclothes investigator whose inquiry creates ambient pressure without direct evidence. Ferrari has the patient, unhurried quality of someone who asks questions for a living and knows the value of silence. He carries himself the way cops do — like he's already seen every room he walks into. Ferrari's investigation is structured as a slow accumulation of proximity rather than thriller mechanics. He begins focused on Allen Alda, a club owner with drug connections, as the primary suspect. Each death widens his lens incrementally. Virginia's forensics don't match anyone in the system. Lottie Voss, who managed bookings at Alda's venue, disappears. Then Mei Fang — a signed artist with no connection to Alda's world — is pulled from the river, and her phone records place her at Rebel Records the day she vanished. Bobby Ann's name has now surfaced from two unrelated sources: Paloma mentioned her in connection with the night Virginia disappeared, and Mei's phone records place her at Bobby Ann's workplace. Ferrari doesn't suspect Bobby Ann. He doesn't have enough to suspect anyone. But the geography is tightening.

ALLEN ALDA (50s): Owner of Galaxy, a music venue on Penn Avenue. Polo shirt, expensive watch, the build of a guy who used to be in shape, and the tan of a guy who goes somewhere warm when Pittsburgh gets cold. Alda runs a drug operation alongside the venue and functions as the story's misdirection — the obvious suspect who absorbs police attention while Bobby Ann operates undetected. His hand rests on Lottie's lower back for exactly one second too long. Everyone in the scene knows what he is. Nobody can prove it. His name keeps surfacing in Ferrari's investigation because he's the kind of man whose name always surfaces, and this is precisely why he's useful to the narrative: he explains Bobby Ann's evasion by being the louder signal in the room.

VIRGINIA REGINA ROWE (25): Bobby Ann's first victim. Virginia is warm, talkative, and interested in Bobby Ann in a way nobody else is. She meets Bobby Ann at a Mei Fang show and takes her home. In bed afterward, she does the worst thing anyone can do to Bobby Ann: she diagnoses her. She compares her to Mei Fang. She tells her she's too controlled, too careful, too in her own head. She talks about her sister's painting retreat in Vermont. She says "let go," "permission to be messy," and "if you could just get out of your own way." She doesn't stop when asked. Bobby Ann strangles her. The killing is graceless and frightening — Bobby Ann's face is as terrified as Virginia's. It is not the act of a predator. It is the act of a person who has reached the end of something they didn't know had an end.

GIGI GERMAINE LINVILLE (26): The young woman from the prologue and the epilogue. Gigi is open, talkative, and affectionate — the kind of person who starts conversations with strangers because she genuinely wants to talk to them. She likes Dan Brown. She can't drink coffee after three, or she's up till two. She tells Bobby Ann that "Fuck the Police" made her feel something. She comes into Rebel Records near the end of the film, buys some records, and invites Bobby Ann over for pasta and coffee. Bobby Ann accepts. We already know how this ends. We saw it in the first scene.

MARMADUKE CYPRESS ANOUK (51): Owner of Rebel Records. Marmaduke has been running the shop for thirty years and looks it. He sits on a stool near the register, reading a newspaper he brought from home because he doesn't trust his phone. He measures every artist against Television and has never found one that measures up. He is not a mentor or a father figure. He is a man who runs a record shop, and he is very good at it, and that is all he is.

ELIJAH CURRY WILMOT (29): Bobby Ann's coworker at Rebel Records. Headphones around his neck and opinions about everything. Elijah is the texture of the workplace — the person who asks Bobby Ann if she's okay, who tries to get her to see shows, who half-laughs when she explains her cut hands as a restringing accident. He is kind without being perceptive, which makes him safe.

ULRIC GRAYSON MCDANIEL (75): Bobby Ann's father. A big man who has gotten smaller. He sits in a recliner, watching the Steelers with the volume too high, and wears the permanent expression of a man who is not angry but has never been particularly pleased. He asks Bobby Ann if she's still doing her music thing ten seconds after she told him about writing new songs. He tells her she looks like her mother while watching TV. He doesn't know these are the worst things he could say. He says them as he reaches for the salt.

LOTTIE SYLVIE VOSS (28): Galaxy's venue manager. Competent, direct, the kind of person who got put in charge because she was the only one who showed up on time. She tells Bobby Ann the threshold for booking — sixty seats in a room that holds a hundred and ten — with neither cruelty nor apology. She is killed off-screen. Her disappearance is absorbed into the Allen Alda investigation.

STORY

A small kitchen. Flat afternoon light. Bobby Ann McDaniel sits across from Gigi Linville, drinking coffee. Gigi talks about Dan Brown, about coffee keeping her up, and about a weird thing she said to a girl at Walgreens. She tells Bobby Ann she liked a song called "Fuck the Police" — the way Bobby Ann's voice dropped out and came back quiet. "That one made me feel something." She's mid-sentence, talking about her sister seeing a folk guy at Mr. Smalls, saying Bobby Ann should hear — and Bobby Ann reaches across the table and stabs her in the throat with a kitchen knife. The motion is unhurried. Deliberate. Gigi's eyes go wide. The word she was saying is gone. Bobby Ann withdraws the knife. She watches Gigi die on the kitchen floor with the same patience you'd watch water drain from a sink. Blood reaches the guitar case. This registers. She cleans the guitar. Carefully. Methodically. She leaves.

Title card: YESSIREE BOB.

Superimpose: BEFORE.

Bobby Ann works at Rebel Records, a small vinyl shop on East Carson Street. She stands behind the counter, sorting used records without looking up. Marmaduke reads his newspaper on the stool. Elijah restocks bins and asks about Wet Leg. A customer wants something like Joni Mitchell but darker. Bobby Ann pulls Nico's Chelsea Girl from a bin without hesitation: "It's like Joni Mitchell if Joni Mitchell had grown up somewhere with no sunlight." She knows everything about every record in the shop. She can't write one of her own.

At home, a small apartment on a side street off Carson — records in milk crates, a four-track gathering dust, a poster with her name in small type — she picks up an electric guitar leaning against the window. She plays a few bars of something old. It sounds fine. Competent. The notes arrive and leave without disturbing anything. She stops. The guitar falls over. She doesn't pick it up.

At The Furnace, Paloma sets a beer in front of her without being asked. "You eat today?" Bobby Ann says she had two granola bars. "That's not food. That's what they give you at a blood drive so you don't pass out." Paloma tells Bobby Ann that Mei Fang got signed. Bobby Ann says Mei deserves it. Paloma says, simply: "You're better." She says it without emphasis — not a compliment, an observation. Bobby Ann doesn't know what to do with it. She takes a drink. "That's not how it works."

Bobby Ann plays her Thursday night set. "Kitchen Light" — a well-crafted song that sounds like it should be playing in a coffee shop while people work on their laptops. The couple at the back table laughs during the quiet part. The man at the bar picks up his phone. One woman claps. Paloma claps from behind the bar. The man in the Penguins cap gives a single nod. Bobby Ann says, "Thanks," into the mic.

On East Carson Street, Bobby Ann runs into Alma — her ex — with Alma's wife, Lillian, and their three-week-old daughter. The geometry of two people who used to know each other's bodies, figuring out how to stand on a sidewalk. Alma says Bobby Ann looks good. She asks if she's still playing. "I still listen to that EP you put out." "That was twelve years ago." "It holds up." A silence. Not hostile. Worse — gentle.

At a sold-out Mei Fang show at Thunderbird Music Hall, Bobby Ann watches from the back with a beer. Mei plays with the ease of someone who knows the room is hers. The crowd sings along. Bobby Ann has the expression of someone watching their own life as it is lived by someone else. At the bar, she meets Virginia — warm, open, interested. They talk. They drink. Virginia says Bobby Ann doesn't seem like someone who plays small rooms. "What does someone who plays small rooms seem like?" "Smaller, maybe." They go home together.

In Virginia's bedroom, Virginia pushes too hard. She diagnoses Bobby Ann — too controlled, too careful, watching herself play. She compares her to Mei Fang. She talks about her sister's painting retreat in Vermont. She says, "Permission to be messy." Bobby Ann asks her to stop. Virginia doesn't stop. Bobby Ann strangles her. The killing is clumsy and terrifying — Bobby Ann's face is as frightened as Virginia's. Sheets twisted, a whiskey glass shattering, fingernails leaving a scratch down Bobby Ann's cheek. It goes on too long.

That night, in her apartment, Bobby Ann picks up the guitar from the floor. She plays a chord. It rings out, full and unmuted. Another follows. A loose progression starts to form. Her foot begins to tap. Something in her body unclenches. She reaches for a notebook without putting the guitar down. The pen moves fast. She writes "Ordinary Weather" — a song about a man with a violent past and a boy next door with a bruise on his cheek. The chorus arrives: "You can't outrun what you've done. / It walks beside you in the sun. / You can bury it deep in the sand. / But it's written all over your hands." She looks at her hands on the guitar. The ink smeared across her palm. Outside, the sky lightens. She starts again.

She plays "Ordinary Weather" at The Furnace the following Thursday. The guitar sounds different — not a different instrument, a different intention. Her voice is lower, rougher, less protected. She's not watching herself play. The woman with the red wine sets her glass down and forgets to pick it up. The bearded man at the bar closes his laptop. The college kids stop talking. The dart game pauses. Behind the bar, Paloma hasn't moved. She's heard Bobby Ann play a hundred times. She has never heard that. The room applauds — not polite, real. A man with a laptop asks Paloma who Bobby Ann is. Paloma says every Thursday and tells him to bring friends.

The breakthrough doesn't hold. Within days, Bobby Ann is blocked again. She performs "Ordinary Weather" at The Furnace, and it sounds like a photocopy of itself — technically identical, emotionally sealed. She visits Galaxy, a larger venue on Penn Avenue, and asks about booking. Lottie Voss, the manager, tells her the threshold: sixty in a room of a hundred and ten. Bobby Ann draws twenty-five on a good night. "It's not a no. It's a not yet." Bobby Ann watches Allen Alda cross behind the bar without acknowledging her — polo shirt, expensive watch, his hand resting on Lottie's lower back for one second too long.

Bobby Ann attempts violence deliberately. She picks up a sex worker named Candy on a downtown corner and tries to strangle her in the car. Candy escapes — throws herself out the passenger door of the moving Civic, hits the pavement, and runs. Bobby Ann sits in the car holding a clump of hair. She drives to a bar in Carrick or Brentwood, follows an old man home, and beats him to death on the sidewalk with a tire iron. She goes home. She picks up the guitar. Nothing. The creative engine has a rule she doesn't understand: deliberate violence, violence pursued as a means to an end, produces nothing. Only the unintentional, unforced kill opens the door.

A dinner at her father's house in Dormont crystallizes everything Bobby Ann is running from. Ulric sits in his recliner watching the Steelers with the volume too high. Sidney, Bobby Ann's brother, talks about drywall subs and framing deadlines. Thora is kind. The children are alive. Bobby Ann tells her father she's been writing new stuff — new songs, a set that went well. "That's good, Bobby Ann," he says, reaching for the salt. The sentence is already behind him. Ten seconds later, he asks if she's still doing her music thing. He's already forgotten. He tells her she looks like her mother while watching the TV — the worst thing he could say, delivered with the same tone as the gutter report. Bobby Ann leaves early. Sidney's nine-year-old daughter, Valerie, hands her a drawing of a guitar. Bobby Ann folds it carefully and puts it in her jacket pocket.

Mei Fang returns to Rebel Records. She's warm, genuine — browsing the bins with the same knowledge and instinct Bobby Ann has, talking about Sibylle Baier and tapes found in closets. She tells Bobby Ann that "Kitchen Light" is better than anything on her own record. She offers to put Bobby Ann on a spring tour. "I'd love to have you." Bobby Ann's hand grips the edge of a bin until the vinyl flexes. Mei leaves. She comes back after closing to pick up forgotten sunglasses. She apologizes for the comment about Sibylle Baier. She offers help. She says Bobby Ann is good. She is being kind, and her kindness is unbearable.

Bobby Ann kills her with a wound steel guitar string — loops it around her throat from behind and pulls. Records cascade from a bin. The string cuts into Bobby Ann's own palms. Blood wells around the line of the string. Bobby Ann holds Mei up from behind — she has to, or the angle changes — squeezes her eyes shut, and pulls until there's nothing left to pull against. She cleans the shop. She wraps the body in trash bags. She uses Mei's key fob to find her car, loads the body, drives to the Monongahela, and rolls Mei into the water. Mei floats face down, turning slowly in the current, and drifts around a bend. Bobby Ann stands on the bank with her shoes in the water.

That night, the music returns. Darker, more powerful. Bobby Ann writes "Paper Lantern" on the electric guitar, her bandaged hands making the fingering clumsy, the clumsiness becoming part of the sound. "There's a swimming pool in winter. / Cracked blue tile, empty sky." The gauze soaks red. Blood spots the page. She doesn't stop. Outside, the sky lightens. She almost smiles.

The investigation tightens around the wrong suspect. Detective Ferrari, focused on Allen Alda, visits The Furnace and questions Paloma about Virginia Rowe and Lottie Voss — two women connected to the music scene, one dead, one missing. Paloma tells him what everyone knows about Alda. Ferrari leaves his card. He reads the chalkboard on the way out — "THURSDAYS — BOBBY ANN / 9 PM" — but it doesn't register. Then Mei's body surfaces in the Monongahela. The ligature wound is different — something thin, metallic, not rope or cord. Her phone records place her on Carson Street the day she disappeared. Ferrari comes to Rebel Records. Bobby Ann tells him that Mei came in that afternoon, browsed, bought a record, and left before closing. Elijah and Marmaduke corroborate. Ferrari notices the Band-Aids on Bobby Ann's palms. "Guitar strings. I was restringing, and the wire snapped." "Both at once?" "I'm not very good at restringing." Ferrari leaves. Bobby Ann puts his card next to the register and goes back to sorting records.

Bobby Ann's performances improve. Her Thursday nights at The Furnace draw more people — not packed, but more. Word travels the way it does. The bearded man with the laptop comes back. New faces appear. She plays "Paper Lantern" to a room that finally stops and listens, intercut with the forensic recovery of Mei's body from the riverbank — red and blue lights on dark water, a medical examiner examining the thin wound around her throat, Ferrari standing uphill with his hands in his pockets, writing something in his notebook.

Paloma draws closer. An evening at Bobby Ann's apartment — wine, a joint, a movie with the sound off. The easy intimacy of two people who have been circling each other for years. Paloma notices the notebooks — the stack has grown from two to five. She tells Bobby Ann she seems different. "More here. You've been somewhere else for a long time, and now you're here." Bobby Ann tells her about Ferrari's visit. Paloma tells her about Ferrari's visit to The Furnace. She asks Bobby Ann if something is wrong. Bobby Ann says nothing is wrong. She says she's writing again. "That's the opposite of something being wrong." They stay up late. Bobby Ann asks her to stay. Paloma sleeps on the pullout couch.

Late that night, Paloma reads the notebooks.

The lyrics are good — she's smiling as she turns pages. Then the smile fades. She reads more slowly. She turns back. She reads it again. Her hand comes up to her mouth. A steel string around a throat. A body in the river. The color of someone's nails in the dark. Hands bleeding from a wound that matches the Band-Aids Bobby Ann has been wearing for a week.

Paloma confronts Bobby Ann. "Tell me it's not real." Bobby Ann tells her she has a dark imagination. "Don't lie to me. Not to me." Her voice breaks on the second "me." She asks about Virginia. Bobby Ann doesn't answer. Paloma says she has to leave. She moves for the door.

Bobby Ann hits her in the back of the head with a wine bottle. The bottle doesn't break. Paloma goes down in stages — knees, shoulder, floor. She's conscious. Blood runs from the back of her head. She looks up at Bobby Ann with an expression that is not anger, not fear — bewilderment. "Bob." Bobby Ann kneels. "I'm sorry." She means it. She puts her hands around Paloma's throat. Paloma's hand finds Bobby Ann's face — her cheek, her jaw. Bobby Ann doesn't close her eyes. It takes a long time. Paloma's hand slides from Bobby Ann's face and drops to the floor. Bobby Ann holds on past the point where it matters. She sets Paloma's hand down on the floor. Gently.

Galaxy calls. Bobby Ann gets the showcase slot — forty-five minutes, a real stage, real lights. She plays "Paper Lantern" to sixty people. The songs are technically identical to the ones that silenced The Furnace. Nobody stops talking. A waitress crosses in front of the stage. Bobby Ann finishes to polite applause and leaves.

The creative engine is dead. Paloma's death — deliberate, calculated, committed to protect herself rather than produced by uncontrolled eruption — has severed the connection permanently. Bobby Ann sits in her apartment with the guitar in her lap, trying to play her own songs. The words are correct. The notes are correct. Nothing is alive. She throws the notebooks across the room. Pages splay open under the overhead light — the best songs she ever wrote, produced by the worst things she ever did, and none of it will ever work again. She looks at Paloma's jacket, still hanging on the hook by the door.

Gigi Germaine Linville walks into Rebel Records. She browses. She asks about Joni Mitchell. She tells Bobby Ann her fingers might be wrong for guitar. She invites Bobby Ann over for pasta and coffee. She writes her name, address, and phone number on a receipt with a little star drawn next to it. Bobby Ann folds it and puts it in her pocket.

She goes back to sorting records.