Buddies

Two pairs:
 
SUPPORTING CHARACTERS (A-minus) - I was endlessly charmed and more than pleasantly surprised by this intelligent study of millennial careers and relationships, focused on two movie industry co-worker pals and their girlfriends. Nick and Darryl are scraping by as film editors, working as a team, and struggling to rescue a cursed indie film shot by a director who is apparently having a nervous breakdown. 

The always-intriguing Alex Karpovsky ("Tiny Furniture," "Girls") as Nick carries this film on his shoulders as a vulnerable leading man with the skills to expertly play off any other character he interacts with. Tarik Lowe ("CollegeHumor Originals"), who wrote and co-stars as Darryl, is a revelation to me; he's confident on screen, and the script (co-written with director Daniel Schechter) hangs together as a string of comedy bits fused with genuine emotional connective tissue. 

At times Karpovsky and Lowe slip into sitcom mode -- they reminded me of Zach Braff and Donald Faison from "Scrubs" in both looks and rapport -- but only in the sense that they are smart and funny. Lowe has peppered the screenplay with subtle but insightful evidence of Nick's cultural racism without this being a stereotypical buddy-cop ploy; for instance, the pals endlessly quibble and scheme over Nick's insistence that they need to cut from the film the scenes involving the black doorman, Rodney, in what is a fine running gag. Overall, Lowe's timing is impressive, particularly in a scene in which Darryl confronts the film's director of photographer gangsta-style despite coming off a crying jag.

Schechter pulls off the neat trick of making a movie about making movies that avoids lazy inside-baseball navel-gazing. The milieu of film editors feels authentic and useful as a framing device. And Schechter is blessed with a winning cast.

The trio of women are strong and rise above the cliché of the young woman suffering with a man-child. Sophia Takal ("Molly's Theory of Relativity") is both kittenish cute and stoner sexy as Amy, who fears success in her career and wishes Nick wouldn't sleep in so much. (She and Karpovsky reminded me of what it was like to be married in my 20s.) Melonie Diaz ("Fruitvale Station") takes the most underwritten part and acts with her eyes to add depth to the role of Darryl's sympathetic but wandering girlfriend, especially in her final scene after he proposes. And Arielle Kebel (TV's "Vampire Diaries" and "Life Unexpected") finds nuances in what could have been a hackneyed turn as an indie diva slumming with the production's tech nerd. (And Kebel's almost cartoonish beauty made me somehow conjure up the puppet from Wayland Flowers & Madame back when the old dame might have been cute-hot.)

Meantime, Kevin Corrigan nearly steals the show as Adrian, the fucked-up director who wants to wrest control of his film back from Nick and Darryl but can't get his shit together. Corrigan, who toggles comfortably between film ("Seven Psychopaths," "Scotland, Pa.") and television ("Grounded for Life," "Fringe," "The Mentalist"), is a master at playing crazy. I laughed out loud when Adrian shows up at a ridiculous production meeting with his list of grievances scribbled on a sheet of ratty notebook paper. The whole scene is carefully crafted as Hollywood writ minuscule. Fittingly, Corrigan's Adrian shares a quiet final scene with Karpovsky's Nick, and in the end you realize that all these men have some serious growing up to do.

PRINCE AVALANCHE (B) - I liked this intensely wistful buddy movie, though its after-effects fizzle away quickly. Paul Rudd plays Alvin, a maudlin man approaching middle age who takes his girlfriend's goofy young brother, Lance (Emile Hirsch), along with him to re-stripe a portion of highway along a stretch of burned out forest in rural Texas in 1988.
 
The result is glum but heartfelt. Rudd and Hirsch are more than up to the task of bantering and parrying their way through yet another variation on "The Odd Couple." Alvin is moody and struggles to project an air of intellectual contemplation; he communes with nature easily as if trying to recapture the essence of Walden. Lance, on the other hand is adrift in the middle of nowhere, with his mind invariably focused on his next attempt to get laid. Alvin, with his Chaplinesque mustache, has a pre-Heisenberg Walter White (or perhaps Walter Mitty) air about him, while Hirsch channels A.J. Soprano, the bratty, clueless son of TV's famous mobster.

Director David Gordon Green has had an eclectic career so far, establishing indie cred with "George Washington" and "Snow Angels" before falling in with Danny McBride's raunchy gang for the stoner classics "Pineapple Express," "Your Highness" and TV's lewd "Eastbound and Down." Here he's quite pensive as he adapts an Icelandic film in a way that feels extremely personal.

The story resonates with Green, and the setting of the film in his adolescence seems to have caught him in a nostalgic mood as he settles into the age of Rudd's character. Green employs tube socks and a cassette boombox to herald the pre-digital era that the men labor honorably in with old-school tools, but it's his lingering nature shots -- forming a requiem for the decimated trees and homes -- that infuse the proceedings with a somber, amber glow. (Green overdoes the cinematography at times, and it makes him look like he's just showing off.) A scene in with Alvin meets an older woman sifting through the wreckage of her home -- and Alvin's subsequent acting out of a household traipse, theater style, as a way of reckoning the experience -- is particularly poignant. (In addition, the soundtrack music, by Explosions in the Sky a fellow Austinite David Wingo, is lovely throughout.)

It all has a vaguely Beckettian sense of absurdism, and Rudd and Hirsch find a mix of dignity and of Laurel and Hardy in their characters. It's a trifle of a story, but it's a wonderful experience while it lasts.


BONUS TRACK
Here is the soundtrack to "Prince Avalanche":