Hardcore Mumblecore

 In which we go back toward the beginning to reconsider the origins of the Mumblecore movement, which marks the transition from Generation X to Millennials, riffing on their parents' Cassavettes. We start with two collaborations between Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg.

HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS (2007) (A-minus) - I'll never understand the title, but I'll never forget my introduction to Greta Gerwig, who, in her early 20s, stars as Hannah, an impatient woman seeking a footing for a career as a writer and cycling through men who don't have the substance to match her desires. 

This project is an Origin Story of sorts for the genre -- Joe Swanberg was the prolific hit-and-miss writer-director of that era; Gerwig would be the It Girl and would go on to co-direct with Swanberg (see below); Andrew Bujalski, a co-worker and love interest here, started this whole movement in 2002 with "Funny Ha-Ha"; and Mark Duplass, coming off "The Puffy Chair" (2005), co-stars as Hannah's manchild boyfriend Mike, who has quit his job without a Plan B, sparking Hannah's first relationship crisis. 

 

Hannah has a chronic dissatisfaction that is rooted in her ambitions. She is interning at a production company in Chicago, and her two main co-workers -- Bujalski's Paul and Kent Osborne as Matt -- are lazy writers who goof off at work and awkwardly try to flirt with Hannah. She quickly dumps the unemployed Mike and takes up with Paul, an annoying nerd. It won't take long for her to tire of his wishy-washy antics. Soon Matt starts vying for her attention, and they have a cute connection when they discover that they both can play the trumpet.

"Hannah" captures that wonderful confusing time after college when you are technically an adult but you are more play-acting at the role than actually fully adulting. Hannah and her roommate, Rocco (a sly Ry Russo-Young), are hipster gals navigating Guyville -- smart, attractive but also nerdy. They are at that new-adult stage of eating out of orange plastic bowls and conveying clear-out signals when there is a potential for the other to have a makeout session.

The dialogue is breezy and mostly improvised. Swanberg has a cast that trusts each other, and they apparently trust him to mold these shaggy scenes into a cohesive movie, which he does well. Gerwig truly is a revelation. Her magnetism grabs your attention and dares you to ignore her. In one pivotal scene, Hannah deals with stress during a spat by grabbing an ice cube and crunching into it, a deadpan look on her face, creating yet another curious quirk of character. She is unpredictable and operating on a level or two above the others, who only occasionally rise to the challenge. Osborne is the best match for her improv skills, as Matt is the one who is the most flexible and the one most willing to patiently learn who Hannah truly is. (Gerwig and Osborne get co-writing credits with Swanberg.) Bujalski, true to the genre he birthed, mumbles quite a bit, and you might be well served by engaging the subtitles in order to catch every whimsical bon mot from the cast.

Gerwig is more than your run-of-the-mill manic pixie dream girl here, despite her peroxided pixie haircut. You can feel the waves of potential emanating from her. You can maybe even sense, in retrospect, that she would not be content to play the girlfriend in some guy's little indie films. Like Duplass, she had filmmaking skills and charisma to burn. It's not surprising that they carried the Mumblecore ethos into the mainstream in their own unique ways.

NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS (2008) (B+) - Going into this exercise, I remembered "Nights and Weekends" as superior to "Hannah Takes the Stairs." Not this time. Swap Gerwig's parade of love interests in "Hannah" with a whole lot of Joe Swanberg as her partner, and that's a lot of Joe to put up with. (He is like a poor man's Channing Tatum here.)

I wonder what Gerwig makes of these early films in her career. In both of these movies, which were released in succession, she is liberally naked. The nudity seems quite natural, but can it be considered excessive or exploitive in retrospect? That's not for me to judge. She is doing quality work here; but is she merely appeasing Swanberg and the boys to a certain extent?

The hook here is that Gerwig's Mattie and Swanberg's James are trying to make a long-distance relationship work, shuttling between Chicago and New York every few months. Their frustrations boil over in often passive-aggressive ways. Neither one can ever quite do the right thing in a given situation.

Gerwig has a natural awkwardness and vocal stammer that calls to mind the 1970s films of Woody Allen. She unleashes very real emotions at a moment's notice and she has a playful way of expressing her feelings. Mattie is frustrated by the era's blurring of irony versus sincerity. When James tries to make the best of a situation by acting goofy, Mattie is outraged; she scolds: "I don't respond to sarcastic fun!" All of this nuance takes place despite the fact that Swanberg is a bit of a cipher opposite her. (There is a reason that most of his quality work was behind the camera.)

You can watch the one-minute trailer and find five reasons to want to watch Gerwig in this film. One scene in particular cements her status as a major talent. Mattie is at a restaurant table, waiting for James, who can be seen in background, outside, making a phone call. She self-consciously primps her hair and touches up her lip gloss, like women used to do in movies. But she's also cycling through a stormfront of micro-emotions. There are so many things happening in that single moment, all captured in her eyes and her fidgety mannerisms. 

You could build a whole movie around that acting exercise. Considering that this is the naissance of a cinematic movement, maybe that's just what these adventurous filmmakers did.

BONUS TRACKS

The trailers:

 

Toward the Lite

ALL THE LIGHT IN THE SKY (C-minus) - Swanberg!

Prolific indie mega-director Joe Swanberg can be so confounding. He knows how to elicit amazing performances from some of the most interesting actors around. But he crafts these half-baked semi-stories that require those actors to vamp and ad-lib, to mixed results.

Here he dishes up more thin gruel, an oh-so precious thin-slice of life. The amazing Jane Adams (Todd Solondz's "Happiness," HBO's "Hung") teams up with her cinematic heir apparent, Sophia Takal, in a barely-there story of an aging actress hosting her aspiring-actress niece at her luxurious but sad rental home on the ocean in Malibu.

That's the set-up, but damn if I could find an actual story here. One of the sharper scenes features Adams' Marie and Takal's Faye quite literally discussing the pitfalls of women navigating the aging process, especially in Hollywood. It's one of the only two-person long takes that actually works in the film.

Otherwise, Marie seems stuck in a cycle of tasks and hobbies that reveal very little. She paddle-boards, she makes a lot of veggie smoothies (really, like 3 or 4 times), she curls up each night and falls asleep to inspirational speeches about philosophy and religion on her glowing iMac, and she engages in heart-to-hearts with the other characters one-on-one. Three times she meets up with an expert in solar energy, learning the ways in which scientists harness the light of the sun. Is she researching a role? Who knows. What's painfully obvious is that she is so sad-eyed and emotionally fragile because she's not letting the sunlight into her soul. I'm pretty sure that's the Big Idea.

Anyway, speaking of "barely-there" and how much is revealed, Swanberg has his way visually with his two female stars. Much of the early action features Adams and Takal squeezing in and out of wetsuits and hosing the ocean off of each other, romping naked like a couple of sorority sisters. Marie kneads her "sagging" breasts in front of Faye, like any aunt would, as compliments bounce back and forth between the women (just like men imagine). I'm not sure what Swanberg and Adams (who gets co-writer credit) are going for there besides the obvious observations about gravity and time in general, or maybe he's just pimping, "Hung"-style.

Faye is pretty mopey herself. She Skypes with her scruffy boyfriend back east. (Swanberg goes crazy with the snowy screen shots here, with needless cellphone and video camera images serving as lazy stand-ins for actual direction and cinematography. As a "style," that technique was played out long ago.)

Marie has a fling with the blandly hunkish man that Faye brings along with her, Dan (Kent Osborne, the star of Swanberg's "Uncle Kent"), providing another excuse for Adams to get naked. Marie paddle-boards and flirts with her goofy neighbor Rusty. Their main scene together -- lazing around on the couch after dinner -- induces winces, particularly her insistence that he do his mediocre Jack Nicholson impression.

And that last part is really what's wrong here. There is a germ of a notion here -- cherish youth and come to terms with its passing -- but it just sits on the screen. These are actors who are work-shopping their ideas on camera. Some of them work and some don't. As in last year's "Drinking Buddies," the experiment just isn't compelling enough for us to spend even 79 minutes tolerating such noodling.

Inadvertent Double Feature: America's Sweetheart

A pair of Anna Kendrick movies on the holiday, from different ends of the cinema spectrum, hipster indie to Disney musical:

HAPPY CHRISTMAS (B-minus) -  An interesting but ultimately pointless exercise in holiday gloom from love-hate director Joe Swanberg.

He assembles three very talented women -- Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey and Lena Dunham -- for some first-rate riffing on romance and marriage. Kendrick plays Jenny, a twenty-something dealing with a breakup who shows up at the Chicago home of her brother Jeff (Swanberg) and his Aussie wife Kelly (Lynskey) and their toddler, immediately stirring up trouble with her erratic behavior and binge drinking.

Dunham is Carson, Jenny's loquacious pal. Early on, they share a drink with Kelly, drawing out of her some ennui and frustration over having given up life as a novelist to have a child. The three women have a few very good scenes together -- including brainstorming the plot of a cheap romance novel -- and their banter features some quality indie improv. Kendrick is fine, as usual, but Swanberg gives her only one note to play (and an annoying Valley Girl patois). Lynskey, much better in 2012's "Hello, I Must Be Going," looks lost most of the time. Dunham again proves she's the nimble comic mind behind "Girls."

The story, however, goes nowhere. Swanberg stretches our patience by repeatedly featuring cutesy scenes with his real-life child -- at the risk of turning this into an unbearable home movie. This had all the ingredients of a quiet gem -- and there are some fine moments to be found in these 82 minutes -- but it ends up being a disappointment.

INTO THE WOODS (C-minus) - If you want to see a good musical (and we're rarely in the mood), find one with memorable music. This fairy-tale cocktail drones too often and never soars like a movie musical should.

Our annual Christmas Day Mainstream Movie gave us two hours of visual delights and a few sharp performances, but as a story -- merging Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella and Rapunzel in a forest setting with a wicked witch -- this Broadway adaptation is a mess.

Ms. Kendrick acquits herself well as Cinderella the Bird Lady, playing coy with a dolt of a prince, a wry turn from Chris Pine. Emily Blunt is surprisingly strong (and in wonderful voice) as the Baker's Wife, seeking to lift the witch's curse so they can have a baby. Newcomer Lilla Crawford holds her own with the adults as Red Riding Hood. Others tend to be distractions: Johnny Depp is silly as the Big Bad Wolf; Christine Baranski is miscast as Cinderella's step-mother; Meryl Streep is out of control as the Witch.

James Lapine adapted his own musical. "Chicago's" Rob Marshall directs. Few of us will be singing or humming these tunes in the coming days. I had a good 10-minute nap halfway through, which helped me survive the spectacle. Those who witnessed the whole thing were not as lucky. 

BONUS TRACK
Swanberg assembled a soundtrack with a retro sound, including this one from Swede Joel Alme:

Digging for Cred

DIGGING FOR FIRE (B-minus) - OK, so Joe Swanberg can assemble an A-list cast of indie actors. And he's always had a knack for drafting a tight script full of natural dialogue. But where are we?

His previous three films have averaged a C grade, though I've never considered any of them a waste of time. Here he's got a fine idea -- a struggling couple has separate weekend adventures -- but he never gets things far enough off the ground.

Tim (the rather bland Jake Johnson from "Drinking Buddies," TV's "New Girl") and Lee (the endlessly appealing Rosemarie DeWitt) are in a bit of a rut, focusing their energies on their pampered 3-year-old boy, Jude (Swanberg yet again foisting his big-headed toddler on viewers). They take a house-sitting trip to the swanky upstate home of one of Lee's clients. While exploring the grounds, Tim finds a rusted handgun and a bone. Lee goes off to visit her parents (Sam Elliott and Judith Light), dropping off the kid so that she can have a gals' night out with an old friend (our gal Melanie Lynskey) who bails on her. So Lee, giddily child-free, heads out on the town. On his own, Tim starts excavating the property, in search of some sort of mystery.

Separated, Tim and Lee are presented with tests of their fidelity. Tim hosts a party with his buddies, and pretty young Max (Brie Larson) tags along and eventually spends the night. Tim takes her on a dinner date, and they go back to the house. She joins him in the dig, clad in short shorts and combat boots. Lee, meanwhile, has a meet-cute in a pub with Ben (a charming Orlando Bloom), and they embark on a "Before Sunrise" odyssey.

The film is weighted in metaphor. Tim's digging is a lesson in leaving well-enough alone and tamping down your deepest desires. Johnson is limited as an actor, but he plays well off of Larson, who is one of the most interesting actors around, though Swanberg doesn't really know how to handle her character. In fact, the director has an embarrassment of riches here. In addition to the fine actors mentioned already, we're treated to Mike Birbiglia in a wonderfully deadpan performance as Tim's pal (and conscience); Sam Rockwell as another buddy with substance-abuse and anger-management issues; the compelling Jane Adams in one throwaway scene; and Chris Messina, Jenny Slate, Ron Livingston and even Anna Kendrick (who starred in "Happy Christmas").

It's an impressive production. But the story is just a little too thin. There's not enough at stake here, and fears of a trite ending are realized.

Joe Swanberg has talent and friends. But he's been making average movies the past few years. He's overdue to either break out or fade out. We haven't given up on him yet.
 

Mumbleporn

DRINKING BUDDIES (C-minus) - We've previously noted the maturing of the Mumblecore movement. With that, I suppose, comes the opportunity for self-indulgent, shoestring filmmaking but now featuring B-list stars.

Here we're dealing with fauxteur Joe Swanberg ("Hannah Takes the Stairs" and not much else worth noting; he has spit out about 20 titles in 8 years as a writer/director, so they dissipate quickly). He throws together a mostly improvisational drama about two couples on shaky ground who get messed up in each others' relationships. (I'm not giving too much away here; the thin plot is telegraphed almost immediately.)

Here, Olivia Wilde (TV's "House") and Anna Kendrick ("Up in the Air") are asked to riff on an outline of a script and carry the bulk of the load up against a couple of duds played by Ron Livingston ("Office Space," and even more lethargic than usual) and Jake Johnson (TV's "The New Girl," which explains a lot). Swanberg's big idea here is to put these actors in various scenes and ask them to act like normal people just shooting pool or shooting the shit, letting his camera capture the magic. Here's the problem: No magic happens when the cast acts naturally. Watching a guy in a lumberjack beard and ironic trucker hat tease Wilde as if they're middle-schoolers or watching Kendrick pretend to play a board game is about as entertaining as watching any random couple of precious 30-year-olds banter away snarkily while sipping microbrewed beers at any random slacker gathering on a given Saturday night.

The whole experiment is just not interesting (and, sad to say, neither are the actors as actors), and that mode drags on for two-thirds of the movie. It's not until the final reel, when Wilde and Kendrick get an opportunity to cut loose -- to actually act rather than play hipster make-believe or serve as cutesy playthings -- that this production has anything of value to communicate, as it finally offers an insight or two into the female characters' needs and desires.

Swanberg has essentially filmed a series of rehearsals. Some of the scenes work; most of them don't. This is part of the process of making an interesting low-budget indie drama; but merely strung together, they don't make a complete film. Maturing as a filmmaker doesn't just mean you indulge your every idea and draw a few recognizable names to your project. For now, Swanberg is coming off as a middling talent with film stock to burn.

La La Land

No, not that movie. We already reviewed it.

ALWAYS SHINE (C+) - Wherein the cool indie kids are indulged with enough money to make yet another movie about the fascinating world of actors and filmmakers, with their favorite twist: hipster horror-flick undertones.

Our gal Sophia Takal ("Wild Canaries," "Gabi on the Roof in July," "Supporting Characters") goes behind the camera for the second time (we still haven't seen her obscure debut "Green") with car-wreck results. She collaborates here with her partner, Lawrence Michael Levine (who made "Canaries" and "Gabi"), interpreting his script about two actress friends who spend a contentious weekend at Big Sur.

Not much works here; the first half is rather tedious, and the second half is a mess. Beth (Caitlin Fitzgerald) is a meek, soft-spoken bleach blonde (looking like Sharon Stone with the sexuality liposuctioned out of her) having some success in acting, though it comes in cheap horror films (how meta) that require extensive nudity and a lucrative beer commercial. Anna (Mackenzie Davis, a cross between Jennifer Garner and Elisabeth Moss) is much more assertive, bordering on angry.

The two characters have such little friendship chemistry you have to wonder why they would even want to spend a weekend together. Beth seems to be passive-aggressively sabotaging Anna by not sending to her agent Anna's reel and not telling Anna that a low-budget avant-garde director whom Beth ran into on the street wants to cast Anna in his new short. That last part is problematic for two reasons. First, it later turns out that the director has Anna's number, so you wonder why he even has to ask Beth to ask Anna to contact him. (That's not the only nonsensical scene in the movie.) Second, it is emblematic of the incestuous nature of this story about pampered, privileged indie actors in L.A. You have to work as a waitress?? Boo-hoo.

Takal makes some curious choices here, and her touch behind the camera is clunky. At times she seems to be nodding to Hitchcock and Polanski, but her technique is amateurish, and she traffics in tropes. Cheesy incidental music fails to inspire dread. Her lighting and blocking is antiseptic; we get luscious establishing shots of the ocean, the moon, a massive bridge -- but the bulk of the sets look more like movie sets than actual locations. We get a lot of twinning and call-backs of dialogue and images, a sharp nudge to the viewer's ribs about the Big Theme of duality.

Takal also seems to be making a point about the male gaze and the objectification of women's bodies, but then she likes to linger over their bodies (for example, showering elegantly, one arm sensually raised high, like they do in Dove commercials), going to distracting lengths to make sure she doesn't show any R-rated body parts. It's more meta commentary that doesn't seem to add up with the rest of the story.

The final half hour blurs the identity of the two women (calling to mind such mind-benders as "Mulholland Drive," which does the writer and director here no favors) and finally cops to being a suspense film. Afterward, you might have a good debate about what really happens at the end. If only "Always Shine" had enough logic and depth to warrant such analysis.

The tinkering with the identities also betrays the limited skills of Fitzgerald and Davis, as well as the holes in Levine's script that they struggle with. In the final reel, Jane Adams shows up for one scene, hosting one of the woman and her slightly creepy new beau. Adams previously paired off nicely with Takal on screen in Joe Swanberg's similarly thin gruel, "All the Light in the Sky." Here, Adams' presence provides another distraction from the story by reminding us what a substantive actor can do with such a pockmarked script.

Levine and Takal have shown a lot of promise. What was fresh and clever in the couple's previous efforts now feels precious and derivative. "Always Shine" is like that sophomore album -- a placeholder that makes you wonder if the first one was a fluke and whether this band will step it up to the next level.
 

New to the Queue

Summer heats up:

Coming to the Guild Cinema later this month, Steve James' documentary about Roger Ebert, "Life Itself."

Richard Linklater's epic real-time dramatization of kids growing up over the course of 12 years, "Boyhood."

A road trip in Iceland for a couple of aging American boomers, "Land Ho!"

Joe Swanberg is back, as quick as ever, with a strong cast (including Melanie Lynskey, Anna Kendrick and Lena Dunham) in a brooding holiday film being released in summer, "Happy Christmas."

If only for a glimpse of his wife, Lisa Bonet, the hulking Jason Momoa's Native American drama set in the West, "Road to Paloma."

A thoughtful drama about a teenager running his uncle's Mexican no-tell motel, "The Empty Hours."

A documentary about the minor league Portland Mavericks of the 1970s, "The Battered Bastards of Baseball."

Banned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi follows up "This Is Not a Film" with "Closed Curtain."

Go Rest, Young Man

 

JOSHY (2016) (A-minus) - We're delving further into the catalog of Jeff Baena, who gave us "The Little Hours" and "Spin Me Round" and who died earlier this year. "Joshy" is a typical fast-chatter comedy from Baena's deep bench of ace performers, led by Thomas Middleditch as a guy whose fiancee's death has left him adrift during a weekend gathering of what should have been his bachelor party at a mansion in Ojai, Calif.

 

Joshy cobbles together some of his mismatched friends who are intent on cheering him up or at least getting him drunk or laid. He does manage to get hammered most nights. Nick Kroll bigfoots the proceedings as type-A Eric, while writer-director Alex Ross Perry nearly steals the show with a deadpan turn as a sober board-game geek who just got dumped by his girlfriend of 10 years. Adam Pally grounds the film as Ari, a married man who woos a woman they meet at a bar, Jodi, played with manic improv glee by the always reliable Jenny Slate. Eric's friend Greg (Brett Gelman) tags along to bring an added jolt of anxiety to the proceedings. Cameos include Aubrey Plaza and Lauren Graham (both underused) and filmmaker Joe Swanberg as Aaron, who is appalled at the debauchery, though what was he thinking bringing his wife and toddler to the event. Toss in ringers like Alison Brie and Frankie Shaw in cameos and Lauren Weedman as a very open-minded sex worker recruited out of dweeb desperation, and when the dead fiancee's bitter parents show up? Lisa Edelstein and Paul Reiser!

Baena shows a keen ear for naturalistic bro dialogue, and the story keeps antics believable, resisting the urge to clutter the plot with "Hangover" hijinks. This feels like just a nerdy attempt to have a wild weekend. 

Middleditch -- sailing along a career high that included HBO's "Silicon Valley" and his improv special "Middleditch & Schwartz" -- is a master of subtlety, and he is the calm center allowing a talented cast to riff around him. Pally and Slate really click as a sweet snakebit pair. Kroll doesn't overdo it, like he sometimes does. And Baena weds humor and pathos in just the right mix.

WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD (2023) (B-minus) - Jesse Eisenberg's debut as a writer-director (before last year's "A Real Pain") has the potential to emerge as a smart indie, but there's just something off with most of the performances, and this mother-son pas de deux too often feels strained. In the end, it comes off like a pale remake of Eisenberg's early acting breakthrough "The Squid and the Whale." 

Julianne Moore never finds the right tone as Evelyn, an uptight hippie mom who just doesn't understand her nerdy son, Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard from TV's "Stranger Things"), who monetizes his earnest, bland songs on the internet to a tiny but devoted group of stans scattered around the world. Starting with that trope not far removed from "Family Ties," Eisenberg must dig himself out of the hole he starts in. But he never regains his footing.

Ziggy is kind of a creep, thinking he has a chance with beautiful classmate Lila (Alisha Boe), who is a cardboard-cutout "socialist," whose big cri de coeur is an anti-colonialist polemic about the Marshall Islands. Maybe teen activists these days gather in storefronts and raise their fists in solidarity with Joe Hill, but I'm guessing this is just Eisenberg's outdated idea of the resistance. (Ziggy apparently cut his teeth as a red-diaper baby singing Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs; I doubt that was a thing during the Obama administration, though maybe it happened to Eisenberg in the '80s.)

Eisenberg -- ever since his remarkable debut in "Roger Dodger" -- has always rocked a millennial Woody Allen vibe, and here he drags his neuroses and anachronisms behind the camera. Moore does a barely veiled imitation of 1980s Mia Farrow, who stammered and ditzed her way through some of Allen's best films. Moore's Evelyn is a do-gooder who runs a women's shelter, but she is so shallow and misguided that she creeps on a client's teen-aged son. Tone deaf to the needs of the teen and his mother, she presses him to give up a job at his dad's body shop to pursue studies at Oberlin.

The theme here is not subtle: Mother and son can't see the appeal of the other, so they search out surrogates -- Evelyn replacing Ziggy (going so far as to give the boy a ball cap discarded by her son), and Ziggy must discover his mom's best qualities in a classmate he's crushing on. Jay O. Sanders ("His Three Daughters") has the thankless job of playing the dad who must tolerate his two unlikable housemates. It's hard to blame the cast, though, since Eisenberg's vision never really coheres. But he did show promise, didn't he?

BONUS TRACK

"Joshy" has an eclectic soundtrack, though most songs air only in snippets. Here is a 1980 nugget that got a reissue 10 years ago, "Whiskey," from Kenny Knight. Nice guitar work.

 

 

"When You Finish" mixes Ziggy's compositions with Chopin and other classical compositions, and then there is this new release, the airy "These Things Are Separate" by Emile Mosseri:

New to the Queue

Adding heft ...

The provocative story of a 15-year-old girl sleeping with her mom's boyfriend, "Diary of a Teenage Girl."

Bobcat Goldthwait turns to the documentary format to tell the story of a comedic mentor, "Call Me Lucky."

A wacky comedy about two women trying to get to the beach, starring another daughter of Chris Elliott, "Fort Tilden."

A friend tees up Hubert Sauper's latest documentary, "We Come as Friends." She writes: "'Darwin's Nightmare,' if I recall correctly, featured war-mongering, corruption, sexual exploitation/abuse, environmental pillage, and general despair. Great film. This one, per the snippet interview I heard with the director yesterday, features environmental pillage, war-mongering, human cruelty, and general despair emerging from colonialist capitalism. Obviously, documentary films change the world. Look how much has changed in Africa since 'Darwin's Nightmare.'"

Sitting through a Paul Weitz film might be worth it for Lily Tomlin and some intergenerational humor in "Grandma."

Joe Swanberg doesn't let up, and his latest has an all-star hipster cast, so we will apprehensively take a peek at "Digging for Fire."

A documentary about the legendary motorcycle stuntman, "Being Evel."

Another documentary, this one about riding the rails in China, "Iron Ministry."

Two brothers deal with love and relationships in the indie debut of writer/director John Magary, "The Mend."
 

Our Best Selves

 

NINE DAYS (A) - This glum but utterly enlightened story follows sullen Will , a onetime earthbound human who now, in his afterlife, vets purgatorial souls hoping to get chosen to life a full human existence and then follows their lives on old-fashioned TV screens and videotapes. When one of the people he once chose and has been monitoring commits suicide, Will, over nine days, interviews about a half dozen souls competing to take the new spot opened up by Amanda.

Will (Winston Duke) has a special connection to Amanda, because, as a child, she name-checked him as her imaginary friend. Will also had a troubled time on Earth, so he can commiserate. He is unshakeable in his task at hand -- picking one lucky candidate for life's sweepstakes and telling the others that their time has ended. Like with a game show, though, the losers get a parting gift -- after spending a few days watching the 24 or so lives unfold on Will's TV screens, they can pick one life-event that he'll re-create for them, so they can get just a sip of what they'll miss out on. The wishes are as simple as walking on a beach or riding a bike.

It sounds like a complicated set-up, but part of the brilliance here -- borrowed from other thought experiments, such as Shane Carruth's "Primer" and "Upstream Color" -- is the commitment to an idea and following it through to a logical conclusion. Newcomer Edson Oda (writer and director) creates a cramped world set mostly in Will's apartment. His characters are fully formed, including Will's sidekick (neither boss nor assistant) Kyo (Benedict Wong) and last-minute entrant Emma (Zazie Beetz, sporting what can only be called an afro'd Ed Grimley hairstyle), who establishes a strong connection to Will and is the only one who gets to observe the inner workings of his operation. Tony Hale (TV's "Veep" and "Arrested Development") plays a sort of sad clown whose bid seems hopeless. 

The brilliance here lies in Oda's incredible command of the story and his attention to detail (Will's operation, all old-school analog, involves a lot of paper forms and filing cabinets along with the videotapes). The dialogue is succinct and crisp. Will's back story unfolds meticulously over the tight two-hour run time. His final scene with Emma is one for the ages, a cap to a powerful, restrained performance by Duke ("Us," "Black Panther"), who carries this movie on his broad but sagging shoulders. It would be difficult to not be moved by this special team effort.

FULLY REALIZED HUMANS (B) - More of an acting exercise than a movie, this endearing relationship romp borrows the best and the worst of Joe Swanberg in his Mumblecore heyday. Jess Weixler (TV's "The Good Wife") and Joshua Leonard ("Humpday") play Jackie and Elliot, a couple who are a month away from the birth of their first child and realizing that time is short to suddenly become well-rounded people worthy of the title "parent." They seek to correct the mistakes of her dad (a prescription-drug addict) and his parents (abusive dad, co-dependent mom) by stretching their perceptions of themselves.

This plays out in unexpected ways. First, Jackie cows Elliot into accepting the idea that they both would benefit from her strapping one on and pegging her husband. Things unravel from there, as Elliot delves into his old emotional scars emanating from his father's homophobic belligerence. 

Your appreciation of this mostly ad-libbed adventure -- at turns funny and touching -- will depend on your patience for post-Mumblecore sloppiness and indulgence. Juilliard-trained Weixler -- who genuinely looks eight months pregnant (she did have a daughter in 2019) -- is an endearing performer, and she and Leonard click as a couple, each generous with the other as improv performers (with key support from a couple of cameos by Janicza Bravo of "Zola" and Erica Chidi Cohen). But this one feels like a bit of a throwaway until the final reel, when Jackie and Elliot confront their three parents, and then the film sizzles with sharp dialogue. Credit to the the three older actors -- Beth Grant, Tom Bower and Michael Chieffo -- for grabbing this thing by the collar, with some sharp lessons for our entitled millennials, and rescuing the film in the end.

NORTH BY CURRENT (B+) - Yet another moody tone-poem of a documentary, here we follow Angelo Madsen Minax as he chronicles a few years with his Mormon family in the wake of the tragic death of his sister's daughter, which may or may not have been the result of household abuse. It is a way for Minax, born as a girl named Angela, to reconcile his own identity as a son, sibling and storyteller.

Minax creates an experimental visual and sound collage that sweeps you up in the swirl of family history in rural, often snowy Michigan. Critically, this personal essay never forgets to draw the viewer into a compelling narrative. He uses a disembodied child's voice (his own?) as a sort of conscience or spirit-animal guide while flashing through images as if his brain were firing across synapses. This is a style that calls to mind such sociological and historical experiments as "Truth or Consequences," "Malni," "Dawson City: Frozen Time" and "Stories We Tell."

Minax's grieving sister responds to the death of her daughter by having a new child every year for three years running. Meantime, she is in denial about her drug addiction and what's really going on with her partner, who was a suspect in the 2013 death of the child. Circling around this are Minax's fundamentalist parents, still struggling with his gender identity. As the filmmaker searches for truths and acceptance, it's hard not to be moved by this PBS "POV" offering.

BONUS TRACKS

"Nine Days" has a lovely soundtrack, centered on the recurring violin piece that Amanda plays at a concert, a heart-breaking collection of melodies by Antonio Pinto. Here is a sample:

 "North by Current" is boosted by music from Julien Baker, including "Sprained Ankle":

The "North by Current" soundtrack also features the Waterboys' anthemic "This is the Sea":

... and Michael Beauchamp's jangly romp "Gamble-Drink All My Money":

New to the Queue

And the big titles just keep on comin' ...

Asghar Farhadi follows up his flawless "A Separation" with another drama about separation, "The Past."

David O. Russell is usually good for every other movie, so, despite reservations (including the whoring out of Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence), we'll go for "American Hustle."

The chatty French drama "What's In a Name?"

Dare we, again, go the full LaBute? His latest attack is "Some Velvet Morning."

The quirky documentary about the good works of Swiss pediatrician/cellist/clown Beat Richner in Cambodia, "Beatocello's Umbrella."

The quirky Christmas tale "White Reindeer."

Shall we dip back again into Joe Swanberg's deep well? The presence of star Jane Adams might make us go back to that well again for "All the Light in the Sky."

Twin personal documentaries from Polish filmmaker  Wojciech Staron, "Two Lessons."

I'll probably wait for video for "Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues." That way I can fold laundry during the parts with Steve Carell.

Love Story: Part II

LOVESONG (A-minus) - Riley Keough cements her status as a serious player in independent films in this story of an unhappily married mom who renews a crush on her best friend from college only to be frustrated by the timing of their interactions.

Keough, the best thing about last year's "American Honey," brings new life to the familiar role of the unsatisfied spouse. Years ago, we were convinced that Lisa Marie Presley (Elvis' daughter) was going to break big on the entertainment scene; she just had a look. She married Michael Jackson instead. But she also married a guy named Keough and begat young Riley, who makes you want to believe that talent skips a generation as she fulfills the promise of her mother.

Here she is Sarah, a put-upon mom of a precocious toddler named Jessie (Jessie Ok Gray), who annoyingly dominates the first 20 minutes of the film. (We know that she's a plot device as a handful and a drain on Sarah, but damn, it is no fun in any context to watch some chubby-cheeked kid of one of the filmmakers (here, the co-writer, Bradley Rust Gray); it's an indie-film phenomenon that has sunk more than one Joe Swanberg project.) Sarah's husband is frequently off on lengthy business trips, so he is both literally and figuratively distant, while she bears the burden of this brat.

Sarah gets a surprise visit from college pal Mindy (Jena Malone from the "Hunger Games" series), a free-spirit and a positive-thinking pixie. You sense an old spark between these two from the start and a stirring of what might have been 15 years or so ago. The two grab Jessie and hit the road for a random adventure, smoothly reverting to their former carefree selves.

Some motel drinking leads to a bit of intimacy -- mostly hinted at -- but the trip ends abruptly after a spat, and Mindy grabs a bus back to New York City. Flash forward three years, and Sarah is on a road trip with the now 6-year-old Jessie (Jessie Ok Gray's much more tolerable sister, Sky), headed to Nashville to attend the wedding of Mindy to a charming guy named Leif (Ryan Eggold).

Sarah stands on the periphery of Mindy's surprising new life (with airhead bridesmaids played by Amy Seimetz and Brooklyn Decker), but as the weekend progresses she finds opportunities to get Mindy's attention, culminating in an attention-getting scene at a bachelorette party. The clock is ticking on Sarah's desires, a subtle nod to Benjamin and Elaine in "The Graduate," or any other rom-com with a race to the altar.

Writer-director So Yong Kim (sharing the script with Gray, who explored similar themes with Keough in 2012's "Jack and Diane") brings a documentary frisson to the proceedings, sharing in the intimacy between the two women.  She is happy to linger, for instance, on a shot of one friend laying her head on the shoulder of the other while smiling off into the distance, or dallying with Sarah and Mindy at a rodeo for no apparent reason.

Malone (who has that look high school girls did in the '70s) is strong as the enigmatic Mindy, particularly in a one-off scene with Rosanna Arquette, in a cameo as Mindy's disapproving mother. Malone has a powerful, natural chemistry with Keough, who expresses yearning in profound ways. Keough resembles Kristen Stewart but exhibits so much more depth. Sarah is deeply unhappy and indecisive, and she aches for real love. Keough's grasp of all of the nuances associated with that is impressive.

Is Sarah's crush on Mindy genuine and feasible or just the manifestation of her loneliness? The movie never really answers that question. Suffice it to say that on the weekend of Mindy's wedding, vows are exchanged and passion is expressed. Who ends up with whom is almost beside the point.

BONUS TRACKS
The pretty song over the closing credits, "Broken Hearted Love Song" by The Shoe:



And look for compelling Marshall Chapman in a tiny role as the mother of the groom. We first spotted her in "Mississippi Grind." Here's her version of "The Nearness of You," which isn't in the movie, but is perfectly appropriate. You can skip to the 2-minute mark for the start of the song.

One-Liners: Paranoia

KILL THE MESSENGER (B+) - Jeremy Renner is fantastic in this above-average journalistic thriller based on the true story of Gary Webb, the San Jose Mercury-News reporter who broke the story in the 1990s about the CIA's connections to Nicaraguan drug dealers' crack trade in America's inner cities.

Director Michael Cuesta ("L.I.E.," TV's "Homeland") brings his sure hand and knack for efficient storytelling to the tragic story of a man's career and life unraveling. Webb's series, "Dark Alliance," created a stir and an almost immediate backlash, as his reporting of the CIA's role -- which probably could have used a few more solid sources -- got twisted into a horror story of government agents handing out crack on playgrounds.

The essential facts of Webb's reporting were borne out, but the immediate effect was a lethal combination: a secret government agency seeking retribution for being outed, and establishment newspapers (L.A. Times, New York Times, Washington Post) looking to tear down an upstart by trying to poke holes in the reporting.

The newsroom depictions are a bit shaky at times, but Oliver Platt is around to lend some Lou Grant gravitas to the proceedings. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Webb's younger editor, Rosemarie DeWitt flounders as the loyal wife, and Paz Vega is rather creepy as Coral Baca, the mystery woman who tips off Webb (or is she setting him up?).

But it's Renner who not only holds this together but lifts it up above movie-of-the-week fare. He brings nuance to the depiction of a man driven to commit pure journalism but getting in way over his head. The domino effect on his career (which never recovered), his family, his sanity and eventually his health makes for compelling drama and a pretty good newspaper thriller.

COHERENCE (B-minus) - This ironically titled film brings to mind "Primer" or "The One I Love" if it were directed by Joe Swanberg on the fly.

Instead, it was created by writer/director James Ward Byrkit (who wrote "Rango"), and he injects this with loads of style, with snappy, overlapping dialogue that suggests a strong ensemble performance. The story: Four couples gather for dinner on an ominous evening in which a comet is scheduled to pass overhead. When the celestial event occurs, the lights go out, and the dinner guests explore the neighborhood, finding that one house two blocks away is the only one still lit up. Two of their crew goes to explore. When they finally return, they report that a group of doppelgangers exists in the other house. They bring back a box full of clues, including pictures of all the guests.

Things get more convoluted from there. Soon we're not sure which version of each character we're seeing. Horror tropes abound, and the sci-fi physics tricks started to make my brain hurt. But I truly wanted to stick around to see how it turned out; I was hooked.

 The cast really tries to sell this. The familiar face is Nicholas Brendon (Xander from "Buffy"), and the star is TV regular Emily Baldoni as Em, whose ex is one of the guests, accompanied by his saucy new girlfriend (Lauren Maher). Baldoni's go-to move is to run her fingers through her dirty blond hair. Others show some chops and provide depth to their individual characters.

Some might pick apart the narrative as ridiculous. If you can resist that, you'll be rewarded with a slick trifle.

One-Liners: Crises of the Soul

QUEEN OF EARTH (B) - Alex Ross Perry stumbles a bit with this relentlessly downbeat tale of a woman having a post-breakup mental breakdown during a visit to the lake house of her childhood friend.

Perry emerged as an important new voice in cinema with "The Color Wheel" in 2012 and "Listen Up Philip" (our No. 6 film of 2014). His latest is a dalliance with the problematic Joe Swanberg, who is listed as a producer and whose influence shows in the style of the dialogue -- bratty, haphazard, and bordering on self-indulgent.

Elisabeth Moss is powerful as Catherine, who worked for her famous artist father, tamping down her own ambitions, landing on the doorstep of her old pal, Virginia (Katherine Waterston, "Inherent Vice"), in the wake of the suicide of Catherine's depressed father. Catherine herself is fragile and gradually unraveling mentally, as Virginia struggles to be patient with her guest. This visit is contrasted with Catherine's visit around the same time the previous year.

Perry alternates between the present and that previous visit to the lake house, when Catherine brought her now-ex, James, who grated on Virginia to no end. (The flashbacks are signaled by Catherine's stark pixie haircut and inclination to wear makeup.) This time, James is gone (though he might be on the other end of the phone at times), and Virginia's lake-house neighbor, Rich (Patrick Fugit, full grown since "Almost Famous"), hangs out a lot, annoying Catherine.

Catherine is highly protective of Virginia -- not wanting the men to call her "Ginny," because that's her thing -- mainly from muscle memory, as she's in no condition to take care of Virginia. Rather, it's Ginny who dotes on (and worries over) her wreck of a friend. Waterston seems to be under strict orders to mope a lot and to train her worrying Bambi eyes on her co-star.

During the week, Catherine sketches Virginia's portrait, and the point Perry's trying to make is obvious: these two "best friends" have trouble really seeing each other, getting each other, caring about each other. He plays with an unrelenting sense of dread amid the bucolic setting. He's treading in the territory of early Polanski, including the paranoia of "Rosemary's Baby." (He is, however, clumsy with a scene in which Catherine hallucinates amid a crowd at a party.)

A spare, tinkly piano on the soundtrack lends this a vague horror vibe. At one point Virginia is seated next to Rich and reading a book called "Madness & Women," although we can't be sure, at that point, that Catherine isn't hallucinating that scene. This is dry storytelling, without the classic horror payoffs. The bits of humor land nicely here, including this quick little exchange when Catherine is startled seeing Rich in the kitchen in the morning, not recognizing him from the year before.

Catherine: "Sorry, I'm not good with faces and names."
Rich: "So, you mean, like, people?"

One intriguing thread in the movie is the conflict between Rich and Catherine. Rich calls her K the whole time, oblivious to the fact that her name starts with a C. He revels in pressing her buttons, to the point of immature sadism. Fugit wields just the right tone as a playful spoiled brat. Catherine eventually lashes back in an epic climactic speech: "You click your tongue and you revel in the affairs of others. ... You are why there is no escape from indecency and gossip and lies."

But there's a big head-scratcher here: If the women are such old, dear friends, then why does Virginia allow Rich -- who's just a casual hang-out -- to be around constantly? Why not just go goof off at Rich's place next door?

And that gets to the hangup with the movie. It seems to be essentially about how women let their unhealthy relationships with men interfere with their female friendships. And this, from the perspective of a male writer-director. "Queen of Earth" has something to say, and it has dialogue that quite often crackles. Perry is working with a Big Idea, but he's not in complete control. This is either a harmless misstep or a female story in the wrong hands.

NORTHERN SOUL (B) - Gritty is a word to be used sparingly, but this coming-of-age-story set in a British northern industrial town in the early 1970s wears the moniker well.

Writer-director Elaine Constantine has crafted a labor of love, a valentine to the notcturnal underground clubs that shunned the mainstream music and instead sweated to the heavy American soul songs that DJs dug out of obscurity. She uses the metamorphosis of teenage John (Elliot James Langridge) to tell an authentic tale of youthful exuberance, male bonding and life lessons in a grimy, dead-end town in Lancashire. (The accents are thick; best to use subtitles.)

Factory-line workers John and his buddy Matt (Josh Whitehouse) -- along with a few older ne'er-do-wells -- transition from schoolboy duds to wide flair pants and disco shirts and jackets, and they are determined to ditch the dull local youth dance hall (where Cliff Richard is still the rage), open their own venue, and spin the coolest R&B on the planet. Fueled by amphetamine, they take the area by storm and zero in on toppling the region's biggest DJ, Ray Henderson (James Lance), who protects his reign by masking the labels on his 45 RPMs so that rivals can't identify the artist and song and track the record down.

Constantine spent years fussing over the production, casting mostly no-name actors (though Steve Coogan makes a cameo as one of the square adults) and shooting them in natural (dim) light, while the roiling soundtrack throbs relentlessly. The characters gradually deepen and the speed-fueled odyssey starts spinning out of control. Numerous dance scenes, with proto-disco moves, exude pure joy.

In many ways, this is a traditional period piece. It borrows a lot from "Saturday Night Fever" and a little from scattered American touchstones such as "American Graffiti" and even an echo of "Animal House." Constantine hits all the familiar notes -- drugs tearing pals apart, the OD, a chaste boy-meets-girl story (Antonia Thomas is sweet as the love interest), rebellion against parents, the hokey reunion at the end -- but she manages to take a 40-year-old memory seem fresh and urgent. A few naive moments can't overshadow a heartfelt, tender tale that is as tactile as a needle in a vinyl groove.

BONUS TRACKS
The two-disc "Northern Soul" soundtrack is fantastic, 54 songs you've either never heard or haven't in ages. Pick it up.

The unofficial theme song of the film, Frankie Valli with "The Night":



Lou Pride, "I'm Com'un Home in the Morn'un":


 

New to the Queue

More celluloid to look forward to:

A summer capper from the "Shaun of the Dead" team, "The World's End."

More maturing for Mumblecore. Time to check in on Joe Swanberg to see whether he's stuck in a rut, with "Drinking Buddies."

The searing French drama of a family of winemakers, "You Will Be My Son."

Marin Ireland alert: The quirky, claustrophobic drama "Sparrows Dance."

The latest from Chile's Sebastian Silva ("The Maid," "Crystal Fairy"), the family drama "Old Cats."

The harrowing story of young Cubans rowing to Florida, "Una Noche."
 
Twinned documentaries about groundbreaking musicians, "Guitar Innovators: John Fahey and Nels Cline."

The self-explanatory "The Trial of Muhammad Ali."

The definitive documentary about the ultimate outsider event, "Spark: A Burning Man Story."

The history of the 20th century through the eyes of its chief cartoonist, "Herblock: The Black & the White."

A romantic drama featuring bed-hopping and swapping urbanites, "The Happy Sad."

Millennials Rising

LADY BIRD (B+) - We were hoping for greatness from Greta Gerwig's solo debut as a writer-director, and while her biographical tale is lovely and lyrical, it isn't quite as compelling as it could have been.

Gerwig plays it safe with a moving but safe recounting of her senior year of high school, dreaming of escaping her Catholic-school Sacramento for the ivied walls and academic rigor of the Northeast. Saoirse Ronan stands in for young Greta, a spitfire who dubs herself Lady Bird and quarrels pithily with her working-class mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf). Her father (Tracy Letts) is the good cop but a bit of a cipher.

Lady Bird explores her sexuality in mundane ways. She is betrayed by one boy (Lucas Hodges, dull compared to his breakthrough in "Manchester by the Sea") and falls in with the kindly hipster Kyle (Timothee Chalamet), and neither love interest adds much to the mix. Lady Bird herself betrays her chubby best friend for a shot at hanging with the cool girl, a concept explored with more edge and dark humor in an aged sitcom like "Square Pegs."

This is territory that has been explored ad nauseam in other coming-of-age films. Gerwig, at least, adds a bit of flair and quirk, as if she herself were jangling and bantering through the scenes. Ronan carries the load here well, and Metcalf is her usual spectacular self, delivering bushels of emotion with a fleeting facial expression than most actors can deliver in a Shakespeare soliloquy.

You hope for grit and soul here, but you get a bit too much of amber memories, almost a form of magical realism, a conjuring of revisionist history that doesn't insult the real people it's based on. Too many of the zingers fall flat. (The best ones work better in the trailer.

At times "Lady Bird" is a special little film. But Gerwig, who first went behind the camera with Mumblecore pal Joe Swanberg in the insightful film "Nights and Weekends," has emerged from the indie scene with mainstream cred. Perhaps she just needed to get this one out of her system. Let's see where Lady Bird lands next.
  

The Maturing of Mumblecore

The New York Times last week had a fine piece (here) about the evolution of the key members of the past decade's Mumblecore movement as they advance in their 30s.

Here are a few of my favorites from the past 10 years:

• "The Puffy Chair" -  The Duplass brothers, writer/director Jay and writer/star Mark, make the first great Mumblecore film, about a guy who is determined to drive cross country to deliver a chair to his dad on Father's Day.
• "Humpday" - Perhaps my favorite of them all. Lynn Shelton's third film is a brilliant study of male relationships. Perfectly paced and expertly acted, it's both funny and touching.
• "Mutual Appreciation" - Andrew Bujalski's only watchable film so far, the first of the genre that I saw, features a strong cast led by Justin Rice as a musician falling for his pal's girlfriend.
• "Nights and Weekends" - Joe Swanberg directs and stars with Greta Gerwig in an insightful analysis of a long-distance relationship.
• "The Color Wheel" - Alex Ross Perry and Carlen Altman meld Mumblecore with the '70s road-movie aesthetic in a dark comedy about abrasive siblings on a mission to retrieve her belongings from her ex's house. The dialogue crackles (and sometimes disturbs).
• "The Do-Deca-Pentathlon" - The Duplass brothers take the Judd Apatow model and give it some depth. Here, two grown brothers re-create their childhood competition, involving 25 goofy feats of athleticism and stupidity.
• "Tiny Furniture" - Lena Dunham's gem, which introduced us to her "Girls" voice and to Alex Karpovsky (who had also been featured in "Beeswax," a passable Bujalski effort).
• "In Search of a Midnight Kiss" - A sweet tale of a couple who find each other on New Year's Eve. 
• "Momma's Man" - From Azazel Jacobs ("Terri"), the laconic escapades of a grown man who returns home to live with his parents.

Disappointments: "Funny Ha Ha" (the granddaddy of the genre, from 2002), "Hannah Takes the Stairs," "Beeswax"

And the genre goes mainstream:

• "Your Sister's Sister" - Lynn Shelton uses Mark Duplass to great effect again as a guy mourning his brother and retreating to a friend's cabin, only to get snagged in a triangle between the friend and her lesbian pal. Rosemarie DeWitt and Emily Blunt give heft to the proceedings.
• "Jeff Who Lives at Home" - Jason Segal, Ed Helms and Susan Sarandon lend the Duplass brothers Hollywood cred in this under-appreciated indie. 
• "Frances Ha" - Fortysomething Noah Baumbach and his new girlfriend, the Queen of 'Core Greta Gerwig, splash the genre in multiplexes in all its black-and-white glory.

Bonus Track

"Bishop Allen Drive," from Justin Rice's band Bishop Allen: