It’s impossible to watch Niall Heery’s touching debut feature without thinking back to Old Joy, the recent Sundance gem featuring Will Oldham or indeed Once, John Carney’s delightful musical crowd-pleaser. Like those award-winning pictures, Small Engine Repair has an unassuming way with narrative and characterisation. The drama is in the details.
The film starts as it means to go on, outlining the little dreams of its charmingly ordinary protagonist. Scottish actor Iain Glen plays Doug, a supremely nice fellow who dreams of being a country singer but is stuck somewhere around the Irish border with no job and a cheating girlfriend.
His attempts to drop off a demo to the local rootsy radio station are thwarted by his best mate Bill’s (Mackintosh) much livelier temper. This introduces what becomes the film’s primary melancholic refrain, how gentlemen friends will stick together long after they’ve outgrown one another. When, for example, their much nastier drinking buddy Burley returns after a stretch in prison, the boys are still prepared to take him on a disastrous hunting trip.
Doug’s already free-falling existence is thrown into complete disarray when his girlfriend leaves him, taking the house. He moves into Bill’s small engine garage where he begins to translate his misfortunes into winning country songs. Finally, he gets a much-deserved break but, by then, a series of dramatic revelations threaten to undo his budding career.
Where Black Snake Moan sought to reproduce the rhythms and sacred profanity of the blues number, Small Engine Repair, named for a song by Tom Russell, is the plaintive cry of alt-country rendered in celluloid. Mr. Heery’s fine film clearly shares DNA with such everyplace down-home dramas as Trees Lounge and Affliction, a commonality he deftly exploits. Like the unnamed border region depicted in the film, Small Engine Repair is defined by Americana. The logging industry, pick-up trucks and country soundtrack are just as indigenous to this spot as they are to the mid-western states.
It’s sad that this tug on the heartstrings is not going on general release. One suspects the film’s natural constituency might be found in spots not dissimilar to the one depicted. No matter. Good performances, expert pacing and pretty lens work ensure that even the most urbane audience will not be immune to its charms.