'Deep Custom' Film Documents Custom Bike Builder

Last night in Minneapolis, at the venerable Jungle Theater on the edge of the city’s Uptown neighborhood, 500+ cyclists and citizens crowded into an auditorium that regularly hosts live independent works to watch a projected film, “Deep Custom,” which profiles in a short documentary format a Twin Cities bike-scene fixture, Eric Noren, and his custom bicycle framebuilding business Peacock Groove Cycles. The film is a creation of director Tony Franklin, GearJunkie contributing editor and pro photographer T.C. Worley, and editor Nick Gumm. Filmed over this past summer, “Deep Custom” gives a peek at Eric Noren’s idiosyncratic personality, his craftsmanship with a hammer and a torch, and the passion it takes to build bikes that often get mistaken as works of art. The film in full, its first web showing, is below. Enjoy. And hold onto your wallet. In seven minutes from now you’re going to want to look up Peacock Groove and buy a custom bike of your own. I sure did. —Stephen Regenold