Author: Greg Akers

Dom Hemingway begins with an extended monologue about the “exquisite” handsomeness of a certain man’s penis: The penis belongs to Dom Hemingway; the soliloquist is Dom Hemingway. The convicted safecracker is receiving oral sex from a fellow prisoner, and, as the description goes on and on, with references to Picasso and whatnot, enjoyment comes not from the scenario but from the delight actor Jude Law takes in reading those lines and playing so far against type. He’s a mutton-chopped brute, a trash poet who likes the way words feel in his mouth, who doesn’t have a thought that doesn’t pass through his lips, who tries out different ways of saying things as if listening for the tumblers to fall into the correct place, who narrates as if David Mamet or the Coen Brothers were crammed in his skull feeding him lines.

So goes the vulgar charm of Dom Hemingway. Hemingway is released from prison — the yegg served time but never ratted out his friends — and takes his freedom like he’s been fired out of a cannon. He’s looking for a man and won’t even take the time to stop for traffic to find him, which he does promptly, beats the hell out of the guy for having stolen his “betroved,” and then hits a pub because he fancies a pint. Law/Hemingway is mesmerizing.

Hemingway reunites with an old accomplice, Dickie Black (Richard E. Grant), who gets him drunk and laid. Successfully hungover, which Hemingway describes as “fucking insurgents inside my brain, Cossacks sodomizing my cranium,” he rendezvous with Mr. Fontaine (Demián Bichir), the man who hired Hemingway when he took the fall 12 years before. Hemingway is hoping he gets a very generous reward for doing right by Fontaine; Dickie assures Hemingway he will, but the look on Dickie’s face suggests Fontaine may kill them both to save the dime or might lowball Hemingway and things could get ugly.

The second act of the film takes place over the weekend in the European countryside among the three reunited thieves. Each character is absurdly lurid in some way: Hemingway has his thing going on; Dickie has a prosthetic hand in a black glove and kind of looks like an aging but cautious hedonist, the way Grant naturally does; and Fontaine was raised in a Russian orphanage, kills people for a living (“one of the most dangerous men in Europe”), and has a fatally beautiful mistress (Mădălina Diana Ghenea). You’re not sure if Hemingway will survive the weekend or what/who will kill him if he doesn’t.

The film is more visually stylish than is necessary, which is always appreciated. Director (and writer) Richard Shepard and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens do interesting things with color gels, and the set design is bold. The script is a little off square, though. A subplot with Dom’s daughter (Emilia Clarke) and grandson (Jordan A. Nash) is sympathetic but requires more flesh, and another subplot with a gangster who needs a safe broken into (Jumayn Hunter) goes nowhere fast. Dom Hemingway doesn’t quite hold up favorably to recent films it will draw comparisons to, such as Layer Cake and Sexy Beast.

Law’s personal satisfaction only takes the audience so far, and the film can’t quite sustain the breakneck fun. But it sure as hell tries.

Dom Hemingway

Opens Friday, May 2nd

Studio on the Square

Memphis enjoys an embarassment of riches when it comes to film festivals. Springtime belongs to On Location: Memphis International Film & Music Fest, now celebrating its 15th year. The schedule is eclectic but can be summed up by the event’s name: There are a lot of offerings from around the world, several from Memphis and the region, and then a whole lot of music-related movies. Like a quality generalist physician, On Location: Memphis is good at a lot of different things. Here are a few things we’re looking forward to most (all showings are at Studio on the Square, unless noted otherwise).

Thursday

The festival kicks off with, appropriately enough, a red carpet event. At Malco’s Paradiso, the stops will be pulled out for attractive man Armand Assante, whose heyday was in the ’80s and ’90s (I, the Jury, The Mambo Kings, 1492: Conquest of Paradise). Assante is here with In Between Engagements, a film about four couples negotiating their interconnected relationships. The film is directed by Croatian filmmaker Dominik Sedlar, whose credits include the documentaries Searching for Orson, about the great director Wells, and Yulia about the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko (which Assante narrated). Both Assante and Sedlar will be in attendence for a Q&A following the screening, which begins at 7:30 p.m.

Friday

Adelante is a film out of Pennsylania highlighting the ethnic confluence of Mexican and Irish Catholics who are working together to revive a parish outside of Philadelphia. It screens on Friday at 1 p.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m.

On Friday at 7:15 p.m., the narrative feature Fall To Rise follows an injured dancer who struggles to return to prominence. The film stars Katherine Crockett and Daphne Rubin-Vega.

Highly influential Memphis musician Tav Falco takes center stage on Friday at 9:30 p.m. with The Films of Tav Falco. The 96-minute program will consider the films by, of, and about Falco, known for his group Panther Burns and his collaborations with Alex Chilton.

Saturday

You may not know who Drew Struzan is, but you almost certainly know his work. The documentary Drew: The Man Behind the Poster takes a look at the illustrator who created the artwork for films such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Back to the Future. The film shows at 1:30 p.m.

Princeton Holt’s film Chloe, set and filmed in Nashville, is intriguing. It follows a young singer-songwriter (Naama Kates) who goes to Nashville to find fame and get her demo heard. Holt and Kates developed the story long distance and then met in Nashville, cast the film in 48 hours, and shot it in four days. The film screens at 5:15 p.m.

Sunday

The last day of the festival features, among other things, two Southern/criminal justice documentaries of note.Missing Micah is about Memphian Micah Rine Pate, who was last seen alive in April 2009. Her husband, Thomas Pate, reported her missing after leaving for a jog, but before long he copped to shooting her (accidentally, he says) and lead the police to her body. The film tries to get to the bottom of things and screens at 3:30 p.m.

Gideon’s Army takes a look at three idealistic public defenders in the South who try to rectify criminal system injustices against the accused indigent. The organization Gideon’s Promise seeks to change the way we think about crime and punishment. The film screens at 5:30 p.m.

On Location: Memphis International Film & Music Fest Thursday, April 24th-Sunday, April 27th

Malco’s Studio on the Square and Paradiso

OnLocationMemphis.org

“In the very heart of the City of Memphis, there is a forest. As old as history, and just as tangled.” So begins Steven John Ross’ adaptation of Peter Taylor’s The Old Forest (the screenplay is by Ross, David Appleby, Susan Howe, and Joseph Mulherin). The film was made in Memphis and came out in 1984, long before there was a film scene in town. (See Chris Davis’ interview with Ross on page 48.) Thirty years on, The Old Forest is back for an encore, playing at On Location: Memphis International Film & Music Fest this Saturday. The film was produced by the then-Memphis State University’s Department of Theatre and Communication Arts and only could have happened with Taylor’s permission. It’s a remarkable work and well worth seeing, either for the first time in years or the first time ever.

The Old Forest is set in the actual Old Forest in Overton Park. (In light of our city’s appetite for concrete, it’s kind of amazing it’s still there.) It takes place in 1937 and considers the convergence of high society Memphis with increasingly empowered, independent-minded women of less proper social standing. Caught in the middle is Nat Ramsey (Peter White), scion of a cotton family. Dinner-table conversation turns to the Cotton Carnival and Nat’s engagement to Caroline Braxley (Jane Wallace), a beauty whose family is no less well off. The problem is that Nat has more fun with the likes of Lee Ann Deehart (Beverly Moore) and her pals (played by Shannon Cochran, Amy Shouse, Kathryn Murry, and Cynthia Moore): women who are relatively liberated, liberally educated, who don’t have wealthy families to have to please, and who like to dance, drink, neck, and drive fast, just like the boys. Or, as the film has it, “Girls who weren’t heirs to anything, and they couldn’t have cared less.”

Nat and Lee Ann get in a fender bender in the Old Forest. Nat sustains a head injury, and Lee Ann flees the scene. The police want to know where she went and if she was hurt. The threat of scandal is right there beyond the horizon. It just wouldn’t do for it to make the papers. Nat’s engagement to Caroline, her reputation, even their family’s interests are suddenly all imperiled. Even the mayor is concerned.

The film is narrated wonderfully by Taylor himself. Lines leap out of the plot. About the Latin poetry class Nat takes at Southwestern (now Rhodes), postponing the wedding: “the only way to experience the very isolation I dreaded so much.” About the Old Forest itself: “Men here have always been wary of this place.” About a women’s boarding house: “I hope I never see the day your sister Nancy lives in one of these places.”

The Old Forest pops, with perfect period costumes (Candice Cain), cars, and locations (art directors Chris Wright and Thurston Hall Prewitt), Benny Goodman on the radio, and an excellent dramatic score by Mark Blumberg. The whole production made me think more than once of Downton Abbey.

White is great as Ramsey. He evokes thoughts of Christopher Reeve, with a powerful confidence, but also a Southern intelligence that anachronisticly calls to mind both Walton Goggins and Timothy Olyphant.

The Old Forest is better than either adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Admittedly, that bar is low, but The Old Forest clears it by a mile. ■

Kristen Bell as Veronica Mars, with her ubiquitous telephoto lens.

Once upon a time, in the ’90s and 2000s, high school was the It milieu for smart TV full of rich metaphor — kind of like how “crime” is these days — from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Freaks and Geeks to Veronica Mars, not to mention the small town-focused, adult-teen dynamics of Gilmore Girls and Friday Night Lights. Each series had strengths and weaknesses compared to the others, of course. At their best, Buffy got right at the life-or-death/end-of-the-world stakes teens feel and Freaks and Geeks nailed the search for self and discomfort in one’s own skin.

Veronica Mars captured the extreme cliquishness, jealousies, and class inequities of public high school. For three great seasons (Season 1 is without compare), the show followed its titular heroine (Kristen Bell), a street-smart tough cookie with an ever-ready quip on her lips, as she navigated Neptune, Southern California, walking both sides of the train tracks that separated walled estates and billionaire celebrities on one side and motorcycle gangs and seedy hot-sheet motels on the other.

It all plays out in Neptune High, where Veronica is a pariah. Her father (Enrico Colantoni) is a disgraced former sheriff-cum-P.I. who accused a rich man of killing his own daughter. It doesn’t help her social standing that Veronica had been best friends with the dead girl and was dating the accused’s son. Forced into loner status, Veronica worked for her father’s business, Mars Investigations, assisting with his cases, mostly spouses suspected of cheating, and taking on some of her own, mostly classmates with ruined reputations or vindictive exes.

Veronica Mars was cancelled after three seasons despite fan-base histrionics and critical ardor. Show-runner Rob Thomas tried in vain to get a fourth season greenlighted by network execs, even going so far as to advance the plot years into the future, when Veronica would have graduated from college and be a rookie FBI agent.

The show slipped into the ether until, strangely, technology advanced far enough to make a return possible. In 2013, Thomas launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise enough funds to get a Veronica Mars film off the ground and prove its marketability to the studio. The campaign was a huge success, and, just a year after it began, the film is finally out in theaters and VOD.

The first minutes of the film are an extended “Previously On” segment. It’s a whirlwind amount of information to convey to any newbies or forgetful types who may be in the audience, but it also does a nice job of reinforcing the basics of the premise throughout the movie while still updating the universe for veterans. After all, it’s been nine years since these characters were last seen, and most of them aren’t exactly where they were left.

Veronica escaped Neptune and is now a law school grad being wooed by a big NYC firm. She gets called back home, though, when her former flame, Logan (Jason Dohring), is accused of murder. Coincidentally, it’s also the weekend of her class’ 10th reunion. Like a recovering addict tempted once again by the spike, Veronica struggles to sort out her feelings about the relative merits of her old and new lives.

The film Veronica Mars isn’t flawless, but it is, essentially, perfect. The plot is tricksy enough, and the cast game enough that it would’ve made for a great 24-episode season. Instead, we get a great 107-minute movie. Kinda hard to complain about any kind of life at all after years of death. So, can Terriers get some of that zombie magic?

Veronica Mars

Now playing

Multiple locations

As always, there are a lot of goings on in the Memphis film scene.

Lauren Rae Holtermann

For starters, Indie Memphis announced the creation of a new series of forums covering technical filmmaking production topics, called Shoot & Splice. The first event is Tuesday, April 8th, at 7 p.m., when Erik Morrison, video expert at LensRentals.com, discusses “Choosing the Right Equipment for Any Job.” Morrison has many credits in local films, primarily as a principle at Corduroy Wednesday Film Company.

Indie Memphis is partnering with Crosstown Arts for Shoot & Splice, and the pair are also reviving the MicroCinema Club, a popular monthly short film series that ran from 2004 to 2009. MicroCinema Club returns Thursday, April 24th, at 7 p.m. “This collaboration with Crosstown Arts couldn’t have happened at a better time,” says Indie Memphis Executive Director Erik Jambor. “We had been exploring ideas for a monthly filmmaking forum and looking for the right venue to bring back MicroCinema Club, and thanks to community demand and to support from Arts First, the First Tennessee Foundation, and ArtsMemphis, everything came together to allow us to launch both programs this month.”

Shoot & Splice is free, and the MicroCinema Club is pay-what-you-can. Go to indiememphis.com or crosstownarts.org for monthly schedules and more information.

Timid Monster’s Memphis-made ARV-3 is in fund-raising mode.

The Memphis film company Timid Monster has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund its next project, ARV-3 based on an Amazon.com bestseller by Cameo Renae. The post-apocalyptic thriller will be filmed in Memphis, and producers have recruited Hollywood prosthetic/makeup ace Matt Singer for creature design. Timid Monster is a sci-fi/fantasy company with credits that include Avarice and John Gray. It’s looking to raise $7,500 for the film. “We filmed a teaser trailer with absolutely no resources,” says Timid Monster’s Rachel M Taylor. “With the resources, we will make something Memphis can really be proud of.”

The Kickstarter runs through April 17th and, as of press time, is already more than halfway there. For more information, go to timidmonster.com.

Another film on the horizon, though likely much closer to being seen, is Lights Camera Bullshit, a feature from Piano Man Pictures. The story follows a Memphian trying “to combat the mania of local filmmaking as political tensions grow stronger and stronger, threatening to undo everything he hopes to achieve,” says producer and star Eric Tate (The Poor & Hungry). The film’s trailer is live at pianomanpictures.com. Lights Camera Bullshit, directed by Chad Allen Barton, also began life as a Kickstarter, and it is now in post-production.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars with Jake Gyllenhaal in Enemy.

Attention, Negative Nellies of the world: Have I got a film for you (and Positive Pauls should probably look for kicks elsewhere). Enemy is a creepy flick, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s also quite terrific, or at the least, terrifically effective.

Enemy stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Adam Bell, a history teacher in Toronto who leads a fairly monotonous life floating through life: at school, driving home, and domesticity with his girlfriend, Mary (Mélanie Laurent). A normal question from a colleague shakes his routine: Do you ever watch movies? Adam’s perturbed response makes the question seem more sinister that it ostensibly is.

Upon his teacher colleague’s recommendation, Adam watches a cheerful-seeming, locally made film. It all takes a turn, though, when Adam realizes an actor in a small part looks exactly like him. It freaks him out and fascinates him. A little bit of Internet sleuthing and craftily playing off the fact that he’s trying to find a man who’s his spitting image, Adam tracks down the actor, Anthony St. Claire (Jake Gyllenhaal, too) and talks to Anthony’s wife, Helen (Sarah Gadon). Adam and Anthony meet, and, pretty quickly, Adam decides this was all a very bad idea.

Enemy does a lot with a little. There’s not much narrative meat on the bone, and even clocking in at a scant 90 minutes, the film progresses slowly. It’s a deliberate choice, though, and the director (Denis Villeneuve), writer (Javier Gullón, adapting the novel The Double by José Saramago), editor (Matthew Hannam), and cinematographer (Nicolas Bolduc) opt for atmospherics over happenings.

The film opens with a series of moody sequences set to a dread score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans: a yellow skyline, a nude pregnant woman, men in a dark room watching a woman have an orgasm, and a tarantula on a gold platter. These are evocative images enhanced by the unknown of how they fit together, underlined by the film’s opening tag: “Chaos is order yet undeciphered.”

The film is designed as a riddle, with the motifs of bizarre reveries punctuating the progress of the plot. Everything might be a crucial clue to solving the mystery. Offering tantalizing hints are Adam’s lectures on oppressive regimes where control is the only concern and the individual is snuffed out; about patterns and the Marxist thought that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, second as farce.” Other clues: A body scar, a windshield cracked just so, a net of trolley wires, a key, graffiti, and lyrics to a songs by Faine Jade and the Walker Brothers. Or: maybe none of them matter.

Villeneuve (who also made Prisoners) is in control of this material. Like fellow Canadian David Cronenberg (who once made a movie about madness called Spider, I recall), Villeneuve creates such a feeling of dread and paranoia in his films that it encroaches on even the mundane. He gives the story space to breath and the audience time to get their bearings on the emotional map and to identify all of the relationship vectors in play. Sinister ideas are born and grow to massive size.

Gyllenhaal is roundly excellent. He finds little ways to express the ways Adam and Anthony are different and the ways they are inseparable, but not so much that you’d really notice or detract from the film’s flow. Overall, he forms a notion of dominance and submissiveness in the connection between the pair, as if they’re alleles of a gene. Adam carries his tortured weight as a physical toll on his body. Anthony is more menacing and secretive.

Enemy is a perfect film to see with a group and debate just exactly what happened over drinks or coffee. Theories can run lots of ways: Is it all psychosexual madness in the mindscape of one person, Adam, with a split personality, Anthony? Is it all Adam’s life, but told non-chronologically? Is it a tale of twin brothers, Adam and Anthony, unknown to one another, that examines the emotional ramifications of their meeting? There is a rack of monsters in the film: Are they metaphors for Adam/Anthony’s guilt or anger, lust or horror, repression or oppression? Or, most disturbing of all, can everything in Enemy be taken literally? (I can’t shake this theory.) The only thing certain is, the ending is … unforgettable.

Puzzles lose their power once they are solved, and since I haven’t yet demystified the film, Enemy retains its hold over me.

Enemy

Opens Friday, March 28th

Studio on the Square

I don’t know when, but at some point watching The Grand Budapest Hotel — maybe during a cleverly shot chase scene down an alpine ski course, maybe agog in the thrill of one gorgeous set-design piece after another — I realized Wes Anderson has surpassed the Coen Brothers, in my estimation.

Tony Revolori and Ralph Fiennes star in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

I’ve loved the Coens forever and Anderson forever and for many of the same reasons: control of the method of storytelling, reliance on a troupe of actors, rich situational comedy, and dialogue-driven scenarios. Each hit a relatively fallow creative period where they lapsed into self-caricature: the Coen Brothers with Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, Anderson with The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited. And, each stormed back with a revival of that old blood, the Coens with No Country for Old Men and Anderson with Fantastic Mr. Fox.

I’ve always preferred the manic unpredictability of a Coen Brothers film to Anderson’s carefully considered artistic schema. But, with The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson enunciates his style with such clarity and wit, he effectively enhances his filmography retroactively.

The film starts with the Author (Tom Wilkinson), a famed luminary of letters who penned the beloved book, The Grand Budapest Hotel. The writer is a “national treasure” of the Former Republic of Zubrowka, a fictional Central European country akin to Austria or Hungary, or maybe just the idea of Central Europe in general. The Author muses on where the inspiration for his story came from — contemplating that most common of questions asked of writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” The Author argues that the stories are out there, that characters and events are in view all the time and that a careful observer will be open to recognizing them. Case in point, the Author recalls how he wrote The Grand Budapest Hotel when he, as a young man (played by Jude Law) in 1968, visited the celebrated, titular locale. There, he met the building’s owner, Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), who proceeded to reveal how he came to take possession of the hotel, a wild, improbable story that the Author insists he could not have made up.

It’s a curious and deliberate way to begin, as if Anderson is saying that he’s not the pure Sarrisian “auteur” (a term which, of course, translates as “author”) there’s every bit of evidence he is. Just take one look at the visual and thematic consistency from Rushmore to Moonrise Kingdom (Bottle Rocket is a developmental outlier, however lovely it is) and can there be any doubt? And yet, Anderson deflects the attempt to ascribe his films’ personalities to himself. After all, the Author is a stand-in for Stefan Zweig, the famous Viennese writer of the early-mid 20th century, who Anderson credits for inspiration for the film.

I suspect it’s all a light jest, because the film that follows the sidestep could not have been created by anyone but Anderson, Zweig be damned.

The main part of the plot takes place in 1932, at the height of the charismatic powers of the Grand Budapest. M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) is the concierge and very lifeblood of the hotel. He runs a tight ship to ensure the guests’ comfort — and many of the wealthy visitors come to the hotel just for Gustave and his physical abilities. The young Zero (Tony Revolori) applies for a job, even though he has no work experience, education, or family. His sober appreciation of Gustave wins him the position, though, and through him we see the concierge in full: commanding, gracious, witty, carnal, romantic, poetic, ridiculous. He wears L’Air de Panache Pure Musk, a cloud of it announcing places he has just been.

Gustave might be the best Anderson creation yet, and, honestly, it might be Fiennes’ best performance. Zero is another of those precocious kids aping grown-ups Anderson appreciates so much. The pairing with Zero is the heart of the film, and considerably endearing — cut of the same cloth as Herman Blume and Max Fischer.

When Gustave’s lover, the Countess Dowager (Tilda Swinton) dies, the will is read, a broad range of characters are introduced (my favorite is Jopling, the family tough replete with skulls-head brass knuckles and a bulldog-fang underbite, played by Willem Dafoe), and the action is set into motion.

Moonrise Kingdom perfected and literalized Anderson’s nostalgia/longing for childhood adventure. The Grand Budapest Hotel perfects and literalizes his sense of the madcap. The film contains several very long and elaborate sequences that underscore the pretense of what he’s doing. In one, a prison break is an impossible caper. In another, Gustave and Zero must perform a drawn-out, repetitive series of tasks to rendezvous with a key figure in hiding.

The logistics of neither plan are necessary, but then, nothing Anderson does is strictly or antiseptically necessary. The same can be said for Anderson’s rigorous visual symmetry and dollhouse aesthetic. Unnecessary, but it’s immeasurably enjoyable.

All art is made up. One aspect of Anderson’s genius — never more present than in The Grand Budapest Hotel — has been in showing that artifice, to take one single step back to show the perfect framing of the action and then to enchant us anyway.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Opens Friday, March 21st

Ridgeway Cinema Grill

One of the challenges local indie filmmakers face is providing for a public life for their movie once it’s finished. Aspirationally, this means festival appearances, renting out theater screens, and, perhaps, DVD printings. For the average citizen, there are typically only a few opportunities to catch a locally made film. But, an assiduous filmmaker is sure to be working every angle he or she can to get the film in front of as many as possible.

Just such a filmmaker is Memphian Mark Jones. His most recent film, Tennessee Queer, first came out in July 2012 and had its first public screening in Memphis in October of that year. For more than a year, Jones took Tennessee Queer to about 15 festivals. “We got accepted or rejected from every festival we could,” Jones says. Next, Jones toured with the film for college LGBT groups. “Then I started thinking, what’s next?”

On advice from a colleague in Los Angeles, Jones began seeking theaters across the South to screen Tennessee Queer. Sometimes that meant Jones booked the screen on his own, renting it and hoping to make his money back on ticket sales, and sometimes the film was given a traditional booking by the theater. The film has played this winter in New Orleans, Mobile, and Gainesville, and it is scheduled for Dallas, Atlanta, and Los Angeles in the coming weeks.

And, now, Tennessee Queer, at this point a kind of oldie but goodie, boomerangs back to Memphis for a weeklong engagement/regular booking at Studio on the Square beginning Friday. It was worth the wait.

The film constantly surprises with its sweet nature. Jason Potts (Christian Walker) is an out, gay man who has escaped his small, small-minded fictional Tennessee hometown, Smythe, to live with his boyfriend, Paul (Jerre Dye), in New York. As if NYC wasn’t far enough away from Smythe, he’s about to move to London (the one in England).

Jason gets called back home to participate in an intervention for his alcoholic brother Frank (Drew Paslay). The family is all there: Mom (Ann Marie Hall), sister Ruth (Lindsey Roberts), brother-in-law Roy (Drew Smith), and Uncle Pete (David Tankersley). Not unexpectedly, the intervention isn’t for Frank but rather Jason himself. The film disarms the viewer though: The family isn’t concerned that Jason is gay, as one might predict; rather, they simply want him to live closer by. “I’m sure you have had fun in New York, but it’s time for you to settle down,” he’s told.

Further, nobody in Smythe cares that he’s gay, the family says. The place is far more progressive than he gives it credit for: “We’ve got a gay who works at the county hospital,” and, “There’s that lesbian couple that lives on Highway 8.”

Jason says he won’t consider moving back to Smythe unless the town puts on a gay parade, with the permission of local government — the likelihood of which is in the neighborhood of hell freezing over, he believes. But the Potts jump at the opportunity to help. His family’s support is slightly unnerving to Jason. After all, he doesn’t want this plan to succeed.

Tennessee Queer regularly sidesteps ostensible clichés — about the South, about the LGBT community, about relationships to families — and opts for charm rather than pessimism. In doing so, it also finds deeper truths. The high school principal (Jamie Mann) fights to make his school more inclusive, painting over decades worth of accumulated gay-bashing graffiti and trying to start up a gay-straight alliance club. Religion and homosexuality are also dealt with directly but with the same positive demeanor. Tennessee Queer features a flock of religious leaders, played by the likes of Jim Palmer, Jim Eikner, G.B. Shannon, and Thomas King, that represent a spectrum of tolerance, from hateful to accepting.

The villain of the piece (but played for laughs) is Dewayne Cotton (Billie Worley), an ambitious alderman and former classmate of Jason’s. Cotton swallows his disgust at the thought of “a thousand homosexuals marching down Main Street” and approves the parade request — to Jason’s astonishment — because he thinks it will create a political fulcrum he can use to win the mayor’s seat.

Playing Jason, Walker is excellent as, ironically enough, the straight man among more flashy comedic characters. Worley is game, as always, and he plays frazzled hilariously.

The funniest thing in Tennessee Queer might be a film-within-the-film infomercial for Camp Nineveh, a ministry to cure gay teens and encourage them to lead a manly Christian lifestyle. “Is your son going to hell? He is if he’s a homosexual.” As Reverend Jeremiah Faulkner, Shannon (arguably the best actor in local indie film today) delivers hilarious line readings and shows his physical acting range.

Tennessee Queer is written by Jones, and he co-directs with Ryan Earl Parker. The film looks great; Parker also provides cinematography and editing, Sarah Fleming served as First Assistant Director, and Morgan Jon Fox is Second Assistant Director.

Catch it now. You don’t know when your next chance might be.

Tennessee Queer

Opens Friday, March 14th

Studio on the Square