SLIFF 2013: Ghosts of Empire Prairie

[3/25/14: Updated for accuracy and clarity in light of comments from actor/cinematographer Jon Jost.]

2013 // USA // Blake Eckard // November 24, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theatre)

[Full Disclosure: I spoke briefly with director Blake Eckard after the November 24, 2013 screening of Ghosts of Empire Prairie at the St. Louis International Film Festival. I have been an admirer of Eckard's work for some years, and have had intermittent, positive communication with him in the past.]

The rural Missouri of writer-director Blake Eckard’s features is an altogether peculiar realm. The micro-budget filmmaker has a knack for balancing the authentic and the grotesque, such that his works often feel like the spawn of a gritty docudrama and lurid fairy tale. This inimitable talent finds forceful expression in Eckard’s favored setting, the chewed-up plains surrounding his native Stanberry, Missouri. On the one hand, every detail of his films proclaim a hard-bitten intimacy with the peeling barns and sagging roadhouses of the state’s lonely northwest territory. This verisimilitude is a product not only of shoestring on-location shooting, but of a profound understanding of how the spaces and textures of Missouri’s backroads affect human relationships. On the other hand, the filmmaker portrays the region as an almost mythically forsaken land, choked with dying grass, gravel dust, and brown puddles that stink of gasoline. When one is lost in Eckard country, it is difficult to even imagine a world beyond the barbed wire fences and rutted access roads. His films seem to unfold in a kind of Purgatory Americana.

Eckard returns to these environs—part realist, part Plutonic—in his latest feature, Ghosts of Empire Prairie. To a far greater extent than his prior works, Ghosts exemplifies the director’s capable blending of the genuine and the nightmarish. While both elements are present in 2007’s Sinner Come Home and 2011’s Bubba Moon Face, those films decisively favor one or the other. Sinner is a small-town relationship melodrama with a naturalistic bent, while Bubba is an Old Testament tale of perversity and bloodshed. In comparison, Ghosts feels poised on the threshold of the tangible and the legendary. The story’s particulars are firmly rooted in its rural Heartland milieu, but its general outline evinces biblical, Western, and noir influences, as well as a dose of exploitation scuzziness.

Ghosts concerns former rodeo rider Lonnie (Ryan Harper Gray) and his dire homecoming to the go-nowhere town of Empire Prairie. There he easily slides back into the bed of local bartender and ex-flame Dawn (Arianne Martin). He also discovers that his anxious little brother Ted (Frank Mosley) is fraying into oblivion under the pressures of caring for their increasingly enfeebled, alcoholic father, Burel (veteran indie filmmaker Jon Jost). This is about all one can say of the film’s plot without undermining its vital third act revelations, but Ghosts is not as slight as such a succinct description might suggest. It is a portentous yet languid film, comprised not so much of plot points as incidents, each one putting flesh on the characters and the place that birthed them. The result is that Lonnie is perhaps Eckard’s most psychologically slippery protagonist to date: a loathsome, self-absorbed bully who is lacerated by secret agony and justifiable bitterness. To observe him descend back into the lives of his family is to become aware that something will explode eventually. Long before one suspects the nature of Ghosts’ secrets, one senses intuitively that it is building towards something gut-gnawingly awful.

This loose quality to the film’s storytelling is likely due in part to the ad hoc nature of the production. Upon learning that longtime friend and mentor Jost had a window of availability, Eckard reportedly scrambled to assemble several percolating ideas into a screenplay, and then shot the film over the course of a few days. Ghosts is, in a way, Eckard’s Mulholland Drive: a film born of exigencies, assembled from spare parts, and given a form that transcends its raw materials. Although the result feels undeniably kludgey and amorphous, it also boasts a realist intensity that exceeds that of Eckard’s more polished features. The phrase “art from adversity,” often invoked without cause in indie cinema, seems an apt descriptor of Ghosts’ successful formula. The film feels like a disturbing, half-overhead anecdote, rather than a work of fiction crafted for presentation to an audience. Undoubtedly, some of this is due to the film’s look, which is dim and grainy, like security footage broadcast from a distant planet. (The sound, meanwhile, is Ghosts’ most conspicuous formal stumble: too often the dialogue is so muffled that it is difficult to comprehend.) In addition to his role as a performer, Jost also served as Eckard's cinematographer. The collaboration's strengths are particularly evident in several shots where the camera's placement suggests a crusty-eyed hound watching events dully from the corner. These formal elements lend Ghosts a expectant, menacing vibe that is a familiar sensation in Eckard's films.

Eckard is working within a rich tradition of indie filmmakers who have provided scrupulous, nuanced depictions of significant yet neglected aspects of the American experience. These include Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories, Mud), Kelly Reichardt (River of Grass, Wendy and Lucy), Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo), and from an earlier generation, low-budget Arkansas filmmaker Charles B. Pierce (The Legend of Boggy Creek, The Town That Dreaded Sundown). Pierce, who was a kind of redneck Cassavetes, displayed great affection for his adopted Southern home, although it did not dissuade him showing the meanest, ugliest aspects of Dixie life. Eckard has a similar interest in the dark side of rural America—not a cartoonish world of racist sheriffs and menacing hillbillies, but country life as it actually experienced.

In Ghosts, the noxiousness that wafts from Lonnie and his family is not unique to their rotten clan. It permeates the blood and minds of Eckard’s hellish Missouri, turning everything to bile. It is this aspect of the director’s works that lingers the longest: his precise evocation of a nasty stripe of backroads nihilism. The men (and a few women) who populate Eckard's films are frequently anti-social and stunted souls, worn down by hardship and bored dissatisfaction. They don’t have any interests beyond complaining, drinking, and fucking, and the faces they present to the world seem limited to sneering contempt, seething self-pity, and blank, quaking anger. They are people who drink Busch Light in pressboard bars because there are no alternatives, and would snort derisively at the notion of “white privilege”. It’s a strain of rudderless blue collar hostility that is immediately familiar to any Midwesterner who has lived or tarried beyond the suburbs. Eckard’s presentation of this culture is not caricature—as it is in so many films, both Hollywood and indie—but raw, feverish portraiture of the Real America that is alternately sanctified and denigrated in the popular imagination.

SLIFF 2013: Sleeping With the Fishes

2013 // USA // Nicole Gomez Fisher // November 23, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

[Full Disclosure: Sleeping With the Fishes was one of five debut feature films in the juried New Filmmaker’s Forum competition at the 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival. I served on the NFF jury, and spoke with director Nicole Gomez Fisher briefly at the SLIFF Closing Night Party. This review is intentionally biased to provide an affirmative, constructive evaluation of the film.]

An unusual species of humor bubbles through the screenplay of writer-director Nicole Gomez Fisher’s Sleeping With the Fishes. That humor relies to a great extent on the charm of lovable, over-the-top characters doing nothing more than showcasing their personalities. Fishes is not a film that sizzles with outrageous jokes, pithy one-liners, or quotable digressions. However, it is funny, in the way that an absurd anecdote provokes a helpless smile. The script contains traces of Woody Allen’s mopey, self-effacing neuroticism as well as Kathy Griffin’s catty, hyperbolic storytelling. While its eccentric sensibility misses as often as it connects, Fishes is a remarkably assured comedy for a feature film debut. The distinctive pleasures of the film lie in observing the members of the titular Fish family alternately snipe at and comfort one another, and in the way that Fisher coaxes the viewer to root for her hapless heroine.

That would be Alexis Fish (Gina Rodriguez), a high-strung twentysomething who fled her Brooklyn upbringing to marry what she thought was the man of her dreams. Over the course of the past year, however, Alexis’ life has come crashing down around her. Her husband died in an accident, which not only exposed his history of secret infidelity but also saddled her with a small mountain of debt. Mired in depression and fumbling through a series of low-paying, menial jobs, Alexis desperately needs a fresh start. Fortunately, one presents itself when her endearingly geeky sister Kayla (Anna Ortiz) urges her to return to New York. Ostensibly, this homecoming is for a relative’s funeral, but in actuality the sisters are plotting to kickstart Alexis’ dormant career as a party planner. Unfortunately, this means that Alexis must confront her hyper-critical mother, Estella (Priscilla Lopez), who seizes every opportunity to comment on her daughter’s appearance and catalog her alleged blunders.

Needless to say, such needling is precisely what Alexis does not need as she struggles to claw her way out from under her misfortunes. The angst of the mother-daughter relationship is the foundation on which the rest of Fishes’ drama is erected. The film’s conflicts are relatively low-stakes, but for Alexis they seem enormous. Her future financial security depends on her planning and executing an extravagant bat mitzvah for an awkward tween (Misha Seo). Her shattered confidence perks up at the sight of sensitive heartthrob Dominic (Steven Strait), but the nascent relationship is stalled by misunderstandings. As Alexis attempts to move past her humiliating and dispiriting recent past, every step forward seems to be followed by two steps backwards. Sister Kayla offers enthusiastic encouragement, but Alexis’ mother is always there, ready to offer her opinion on exactly how her daughter has erred.

As with many indie comedies, the film's most serious weaknesses lie in pacing and structure. Too often, scenes feel excessively and haphazardly episodic, more like standalone sketches from improv night than slices of a cohesive narrative. Fortunately, Fishes generally maintains a cartoonish, somewhat breathless tone that keeps things moving through sequences of deadpan snark and general sitcom zaniness. Fisher is adept in her treatment of Alexis’ mixed Latina-Jewish heritage, which is integral to the film’s personality but never threatens to devours the story. Alexis’ ethnic identity finds expression not only in her anxious, sharp-tongued persona, but also in the film’s biting but warm-hearted depiction of her parents. Estella and Leonard (Tibor Feldman) simultaneously embody and subtly tweak stereotypes regarding Latin mothers and Jewish fathers, and it is in their private moments with Alexis that the film finds a touch of honest-to-goodness pathos.

The challenge (and occasional necessity) of starting over in life is the prevailing theme of Fishes, and while the film has nothing particularly novel to say on the subject, it is nonetheless an enjoyable little bauble. Rodriguez is astonishingly precise in her portrayal of Alexis, conveying just enough insecurity and goggle-eyed panic that one can believe a woman as smart, sexy, and witty as she could still be an absolute train wreck under the right circumstances. That the viewer is pulling for Alexis by the end is not attributable solely (or even mostly) to her pitiable situation. Rather, it rests on the character's instinctive goodness, quick thinking, and sheer pluck in the face of adversities that would have defeated a lesser woman. Despite what her mother may insist, Alexis is worthy of a little love and success just as she is.

SLIFF 2013: How We Got Away With It

2014 // USA // Jon Lindstrom // November 23, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

[Full Disclosure: How We Got Away With It was one of five debut feature films in the juried New Filmmaker’s Forum competition at the 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival. I served on the NFF jury, and spoke with director Jon Lindstrom briefly at the SLIFF Closing Night Party. This review is intentionally biased to provide an affirmative, constructive evaluation of the film.]

Director Jon Lindstrom’s ambitious debut feature, How We Got Away With It, functions as a mystery on many levels. As it says right there in the title, the film concerns the process by which a group of unlikely individuals successfully commit and cover up a brutal crime. Yet the film is as concerned with the What and Why as it is with the How. For a hefty portion of the How's running time, the exact misdeed that is perpetrated remains murky, until it is abruptly revealed in a vicious, startling flashback. Most crucially, the motive for the crime is only explained in the final scenes, creating a nagging itch that scurries beneath the surface of the film, always just out of reach.

This somewhat elliptical approach to what is otherwise a straightforward tale of bloodshed and lies is both How’s most distinctive narrative feature and its most confounding flaw. The screenplay, co-written by Lindstrom and actors McCaleb Burnett and Jeff Barry, begins with a solid, even intriguing premise. A circle of thirtysomething friends are gathering for their annual hang-out at the sprawling seaside home of Henry (Burnett), an affable restaurateur. Before the festivities kick off, however, Henry arrives home to find a dead woman swinging from a rope in his dining room.

The questions begin accumulating immediately: Who is the deceased? Why did she end her life? Why does Henry not call the police, but instead hastily cut down and conceal the body before his friends arrive? That How feels no particular need to rush answers for these or any other queries is indicative of the film’s approach to story development. It favors a light, quasi-naturalistic touch that can occasionally be frustrating in its obfuscations. As the guests begin to appear, the lay of the land only get more convoluted. It takes some time to sort out who everyone is, what their relationships to one another are, and whether any particular individual is involved in Henry’s plans. As it turns out, the host has a dark scheme in mind for the weekend, a plot whose urgency only seems to have been heightened by the suicide cover-up.

Henry is mellow and gregarious with his friends, but privately wary and cold-blooded. In short order, he reveals his designs to his vaguely loutish but devoted friend Will (Barry) and unintentionally pulls in the group’s token burnout, Ronnie (Jacob Knoll). Both men reluctantly agree to assist Henry with his plan, which entails a sinister fate for a man named Walter (Richard Bekins). An older, middle-aged drunk employed at Henry’s restaurant, Walter is plainly loathed by the man and his friends, but as with many elements of How’s story, the reasons are initially obscured.

Meanwhile, numerous other story threads are woven into the film’s fabric, not all of them especially enriching: relationship troubles between Will and his girlfriend Leigh (Mikal Evans); Elizabeth’s (Brianne Moncrief) awkwardness as the outsider in the group; and Dallas’ (Luke Robertson) mounting agitation at the absence of Henry’s sister, Sarah (Samantha Soule). Eventually, a dogged police detective (Lindstrom) begins skulking about and engaging in some highly questionable search and seizure practices.

How's screenplay desperately could have used further revisions, at it is swollen with needless character details, repetitive scenes, and go-nowhere subplots. The script doesn’t feel so much unpolished as half-finished and undisciplined. The cast could have been pruned of one or two characters with no discernible effect on the story, beyond tightening it up considerably. Certainly, Henry’s girlfriend Anne (Cassandra Freeman) serves no particular purpose in the narrative, and Leigh mostly drops out of sight after a quarrel with Will. At times, distracting implausibilities bring the film screeching to a halt—as in the aforementioned dodgy policework—which is unfortunate given that How’s dominant sensibility is that of a tightening vice. The film’s performances are serviceable but mostly unremarkable. Burnett must carry most of the scenes, and he rises to the occasion capably. While his Everyman good looks and laid-back demeanor initially seem a poor fit for a criminal schemer, Burnett shapes Henry into a credible character: perceptive, quick-witted, smooth at deception, and wracked with secret anguish.

Despite the script’s serious issues, there is something unsettling about How. It’s in the strange menace that Lindstrom evokes from the alluring summer beaches of the film’s Rochester, New York setting and from Henry’s breezy, slightly gaudy home. It’s in the way that the film’s indefinite sympathies and narrative obliqueness recall Hitchcock and Haneke, respectively, without making a self-important point about doing so. It’s the sudden manner in which the film’s deliberateness and understatement give way to sickening brutality in the third act, such that it seems like a chilling plunge into gangster or horror cinema.  At the SLIFF screening, Lindstrom cited The Virgin Spring as an influence, but it is Wes Craven’s post-Manson family remix of that film, The Last House on the Left, that seems more closely entwined with How's darkling aspect. Such points of engagement render How We Got Away With It a far more intriguing work than its distressingly rough-edged story would otherwise suggest.

SLIFF 2013: This Is Where We Live

2013 // USA // Josh Barrett and Marc Menchaca // November 23, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theatre)

[Full Disclosure: This Is Where We Live was one of five debut feature films in the juried New Filmmaker’s Forum competition at the 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival. I served on the NFF jury, which ultimately awarded the NFF Emerging Director Award to This Is Where We Live directors Josh Barrett and Marc Menchaca on November 24, 2013. This review is intentionally biased to provide an affirmative, constructive evaluation of the film.]

The nickel summary of Josh Barrett and Marc Menchaca’s debut feature, This Is Where We Live, creates a very specific set of expectations. In the hill country of central Texas, thirtysomething handyman Noah (Menchaca) is abruptly pulled into the lives of the troubled Sutton family to work as a caretaker for young adult son August (Tobias Segal), whose cerebral palsy has rendered him nearly immobile and non-verbal. As one might expect, bonds are formed, friction arises, and wisdom is attained. It’s the sort of story that naturally lends itself to cloying, faux-uplifting cinema, palatable to middlebrow art house audiences and completely unmemorable.

What makes This Is Where We Live so distinctive is its tart refusal to fulfill these expectations. The film consistently avoids cliche in favor of a nuanced, authentic portrait of a hard-bitten, blue collar Middle America.  Much of the credit is due to Menchaca’s script, with a story assist provided by Barrett. Where some screenwriters might be tempted to subvert the well-worn formulae of indie drama by exploding it, the writers of This Is Where We Live take a gentler approach. The film refuses to confine its characters within tired archetypes, and favors a naturalistic story progression over contrived plot developments.

A case in point is Noah himself, who in a lesser feature would be a colossal jerk who discovers his capacity for selfless compassion by tending to August’s needs. In fact, Noah’s good-natured character is apparent from the outset, as evidenced by his joking manner with August and his unflinching acceptance of matriarch Diane’s (C.K. McFarlane) job offer. Yet Noah is no angel: frequently frustrated by August's actions and his own inability to communicate effectively with the man, their relationship is a fitful and uneasy one. Although the handyman’s time with the Suttons throws new light on his own troubled history, Noah’s personal journey is not the most conspicuous aspect of the film’s story. Rather, This Is Where We Live is primarily a tale of clashing personalities and assumptions, where the dynamics between the abled and disabled—and between family and outsider—play a crucial role.

Another prominent example of the film’s heterodox qualities is long-suffering Diane, who would normally be the most sympathetic character in the story. She’s a pummeled and exhausted woman, drowning under the demands of her afflicted son, a husband (Ron Hayden) suffering from early dementia, and a listless, combative daughter (Frankie Shaw). To these burdens are added Diane's own secret help problems and the sadly typical economic hardships of small town life. Yet while Barrett and Menchaca present Diane as pitiable, she is a hardly a self-sacrificing saint. Her dyspeptic, stodgy, and over-protective tendencies set her into conflict with her family and with Noah, whose almost naive eagerness to make August happy leads him to stray from his caregiver duties into the questionable role of best pal. Diane watches over her son jealously, and is loathe to allow anyone else decide what is best for her family.

This sort of off-center approach to what could have been a irksome, saccharine tale is essential to the appeal of This Is Where We Live. Perhaps it’s a bit of a backhanded compliment to assert that a work’s finest achievement rests on what it doesn’t do, but there is still plenty to admire in the film’s acting and aesthetics. Segal, who does not have cerebral palsy, dives into the role of August with ferocity and delicacy in equal measure, without making the film all about his necessarily splashy performance. (August’s condition is not the central pillar of the film, but more akin to the star around which the story's events orbit. The distinction is vital.) The rest of the cast is also in fine form, with Hayden in particular making a strong impression. Cinematographer Ryan Booth provides the Lone Star landscape with a glint of loveliness to offset all the dust and peeling paint, recalling a lo-fi version of Bradford Young’s recent work on another Texas tale, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.

The missteps in This Is Where We Live are mostly at the high-altitude level. It’s hard to find fault with any scenes when they are considered individually, but as a whole the assembled film has a certain shagginess to it, and an unfortunate habit of repeating itself. Although it is already lean at 92 minutes, a bit of bloody-mindedness in the editing room could have made the film positively hum. At times, Barrett and Menchaca treat some aspects of the story with such a light touch that it seems less like dog-eared realism and more like gratuitous elision. In particular, Noah’s past remains a foggy cluster of grief and resentments, which wouldn’t be a concern if the film didn’t regard that past as an essential aspect of his character. These complaints aside, This Is Where We Live is a remarkably strong first-time feature. A consistently surprising and carefully considered work, it reveals that complex human drama is still out there, waiting to be discovered in the substrate of rural America. It feels true, which is a rarified thing in an increasingly flattened and unadventurous topography of indie filmmaking.

SLIFF 2013: 9 Full Moons

2013 // USA // Tomer Almagor // November 22, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theatre)

[Full Disclosure: 9 Full Moons was one of five debut feature films in the juried New Filmmaker’s Forum competition at the 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival. I served on the NFF jury, and spoke with director Tomer Almagor briefly at the SLIFF Closing Night Party. This review is intentionally biased to provide an affirmative, constructive evaluation of the film.]

Perhaps more than any other American city, Los Angeles has a distinctive mood. It’s a schizophrenic mingling of glamour and sleaze, promise and disillusionment, warmth and alienation. Numerous films have succeeded in capturing that aura, although in most cases the City of Angels also plays an essential role in the narrative (see: Sunset Blvd., Chinatown, Boyz n the Hood, L.A. Confidential, Mulholland Drive). A rarer subspecies of the L.A. film is one in which any city could have sufficed as a setting, but the distinctive Angelino vibe is so potently expressed, one can't imagine the film unfolding anywhere else (see: Double Indemnity, Short Cuts, Heat, Punch-Drunk Love, Drive).

Into this latter category one can place writer-director Tomer Almagor's debut feature, 9 Full Moons, a romantic tragedy that gets the peculiar L.A. mood exactly right. The film admittedly leans towards the desolate. 9 Full Moons is a story of simple dreams that are variously stalled, derailed, and crushed, usually as a result of plain old human fallibility. Although Almagor slides in the odd scene of sun-drenched contentment, the look of the film's nocturnal sequences leaves the strongest impression. It is a nightscape of desperation and discontent. There are dive bars dense with smoke and neon gloom, cold suppers waiting in shadowed kitchens, and midnight streets awash in sickly, sodium-yellow light.

It is a fitting setting for what is, at bottom, a straightforward tale of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl. The fellow in question is the guileless, square-jawed Lev (Brett Roberts), an aspiring audio engineer who makes ends meet as a car service driver. One night he crosses paths with alluring wild girl Frankie (Amy Seimetz), and they eventually tumble into bed, where they exhibit an urgency and vulnerability that seems novel for both of them. What follows is an intense but erratic romance characterized by alternating periods of domestic bliss and explosive resentment. The conflicts that arise are mostly prosaic clashes of personality: Frankie is restless and hostile, while Lev is negligent and befuddled. However, Almagor—and Seimetz in particular—lend the story an anguished vividness that overcomes the banality inherent to relationship drama.

Who ultimately bears responsibility for Lev and Frankie's charred ruin of a relationship is a contentious question, but 9 Full Moons is not especially concerned with moralizing or laying blame. The tone of the film is one of sorrowful observation. Frankie is a profoundly wounded person: an abused self-harmer who yearns for the stability of a loving partner, but whose self-loathing compels her to drink and carouse with the creeps at the corner watering hole. Lev's fumbling attempts at emotional intimacy are sweet but often tone-deaf, and he becomes distant as professional opportunities begin demanding more of his time. Yet his most significant failing as a partner is his latently sexist assumption that all Frankie needs is a good man to save her, coupled with his narcissistic belief that he is the man to do it. Watching as happiness slips through these characters' fingers carries an ache that resonates with the film’s evocative depiction of L.A.

Where 9 Full Moons tends to stumble is in its performances and screenplay.  Roberts, bless his wavy romance novel locks, just isn’t acting at the same level as Seimetz, and this gap muffles the romantic chemistry and searing catharsis that the story demands. Roberts is adept at registering a kind of expectant uneasiness, which is fitting for Lev, but it doesn’t exactly make for electric leading man material. Almagor’s script, meanwhile, devotes an unnecessary amount of time to a subplot about washed-up country music star Charlie King Nash (Donal Logue), who draws Lev into his orbit. Logue’s presence is always a pleasure, and this narrative tangent does indeed have ripple effects on Lev and Frankie’s life together, but too often it feels like a distraction. The slender thematic echoes and counterpoints provided by Lev’s whirlwind relationship with Nash aren’t worth diverting attention away from the film’s primary plot. When 9 Full Moons is focused on the forlorn two-person saga of Lev and Frankie, it’s at its most affecting and intriguing.

SLIFF 2013: Farah Goes Bang

2013 // USA // Meera Menon // November 22, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theatre)

[Full Disclosure: Farah Goes Bang was one of five debut feature films in the juried New Filmmaker’s Forum competition at the 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival. I served on the NFF jury, and spoke with director Meera Menon briefly at the SLIFF Closing Night Party. This review is intentionally biased to provide an affirmative, constructive evaluation of the film.]

The conventions of the road movie and sex comedy are blended with dashes of multicultural wit and liberal politics in director Meera Menon’s sprightly debut feature, Farah Goes Bang. The eponymous Farah (Nikohl Boosheri) is a sunny but faintly shy Persian-American, who in the autumn of 2004 finds herself newly single and in a post-graduation slump. Her Type A Indian-American friend Roopa (Kiran Deol) has coerced her to leave California behind and stump for John Kerry in the purplish wilds of Ohio. Also along for this cross-country road trip is token white girl K.J. (Kandis Erickson), who shares her friends’ politics, but is a bit more of a prickly slacker at heart.

For Farah, this odyssey represents not only the opportunity to oust the despised George W. Bush from office, but a chance to finally lose her virginity. (There will be, presumably, an abundance of hot progressive guys in Ohio.) Her quest has little to do with love or relationships: it’s all about Farah getting past her sexual hang-ups so she can get on with the business of being an adult. Of course, declaring that her cherry will be popped by Election Night come hell or high water creates a lot of pressure. The situation is not helped by Roopa and K.J.’s good-natured teasing, or the expectations implicit in the economy size box of Trojans stashed in the back of the car.

The film’s screenplay, by Menon and Laura Goode, is fairly straightforward indie dramedy fare. Naturally, the women joke, quarrel, and reconcile along the way. Naturally, they cross paths with a diverse array of mostly one-dimensional characters, from the obligatory bigots to a sassy drag queen. Naturally—spoiler alert!—Farrah does indeed lose her virginity, and beneath a night sky blooming with fireworks, no less. The story is pleasant and fluffy without being syrupy, although there’s little to distinguish it from countless other Sundance-friendly tales about stalled twentysomethings and Middle American dysfunction.

That said, Menon and Goode enliven the proceedings a bit with odd twists and memorable moments. Some of these are deliciously crude, as in Farah’s attempt to preemptively break her hymen with a plastic toy gun in a gas station bathroom. Others are genuinely affecting, such as a scene where K.J. spontaneously opens up to a prospective voter while working the Kerry phone banks. (Menon rather cunningly presents this exchange so that only K.J.’s side of the conversation can be heard.)

The pall that hangs over the film, of course, is that the viewer knows exactly how the 2004 election ended: with four more calamitous years in the reign of C-Plus Augustus, to borrow Charles Pierce’s memorable title for the 43rd U.S. President. This is foreshadowed in the women’s awkwardly defensive pro-Kerry pitch, which is focused on correcting misinformation about their candidate’s war record. An old political adage seems applicable: when you’re spending your time fending off the other candidate’s attacks, you’re losing. In the disappointing aftermath of Election Night, the women concede that they were never that enthusiastic about John Kerry after all. This declaration has the whiff of sour grapes, but it’s also a broader admission that maybe the choices the women have made haven’t always been the wisest. Where Farah’s first taste of the dirty deed is concerned, however, there are no regrets.