Kwik Stop

I cannot for the life of me recall how or why this got onto my Netflix queue. Nor do I remember what made me look through that mountain of movies (most of which seem “good for you” and thus remain ever-hopeful numbers 100-300 out of my ridiculous 462 films lined up) to spot this little gem. But it is a great, small film.

The plot starts like and often echoes the familiar beats of the young-turks/lovers-on-the-road flick…. and it persistently avoids falling into such ruts, or rushing into action. Instead, four central performances anchor the film in moments and scenes, and the narrative meanders along, until after a while you realize there’s a fairly substantive, subtle structure underlying what happens, playing off the title’s oxymoronic resonance. And it’s all unextravagantly but lovingly filmed, with careful compositions, a nice eye for telling scenic details, a remarkable confidence about how to frame and position the actors’ work. The writing is superb–not exactly realistic but never artificial, absurd at times, painfully realistically awkward at others.

And it is an actor’s movie. You’ll recognize none of them, or maybe one–but you’ll be surprised that you don’t. Why aren’t these people huge? They’re that good. But they’re not raising the roof. One of the leads–Lucky–has a cut-out of Harvey Keitel smoking a cigarette glued to his rearview mirror, and when he picks up DeeDee at a small-town convenience store, en route (he says) to Hollywood, she jumps at the picture, raving about Keitel in Fingers. They talk films, reference Mean Streets and debate whether Keitel can steal any of the screen’s energy away from De Niro, and then bicker about Henry Miller and whether _Tropic of Cancer_ was ever filmed. And I thought–oh, yeah, I see: another indie film wearing its loves for other, earlier films on its sleeve. But, no: the acting in this film is almost pointedly unlike such method(ical) emoting–and the plot, too, steers clear of hyperbolic existential Milleresque murmuring, or crime-spree shenanigans, or… well, let’s just say I almost never knew quite where the film was going, and I don’t want to say anything to set up expectations. I would just say watch it.

I see that Charles Taylor at Slate raved about it, too, and I know it got lots of fest buzz, but that’s it–never played a theater near most (or any?) of us. And the actors slipped back, it seems, into the shadows and guy-down-the-bar roles of primetime TV and not-so-primetime filmmaking. A shame. This is a very fine film.