‘Sound of Noise’ riffs on cops, rogue musicians; director/drummer to battle Melvins Friday at Cinefamily

March 7, 2012 by

Sound of Noise/2010/Magnolia Pictures/102 min.

The cop drama gets a frenetic comic spin in “Sound of Noise” by Swedish filmmakers Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson. When a group of six drummers decides to unleash anarchy by commandeering everyday objects (medical equipment, paper shredders, jack hammers) to use as makeshift instruments, they draw the ire of a police officer with an ax to grind.

Amadeus Warnebring (Bengt Nilsson) is the tone-deaf black sheep in a family of prominent musicians and, though he hates music, he has what it takes to track down these percussive renegades. “There’s a metronome here somewhere,” Amadeus tells his team as he surveys the scene after one of the gang’s hit-and-run performances. “Find it.”

Leading the raids is a take-charge blonde named Sanna Persson (Sanna Persson Halapi), who has decided it’s time to strike back in a city that’s “contaminated by shitty music.” (The city as well as the exact time is undefined; the film was shot mostly in Malmö, Sweden.) Despite his frustration, which he vents at one point by smashing instruments, Amadeus also finds it hard to resist Sanna’s allure.

Weirdly original and whimsically entertaining, “Sound of Noise” charms in a way that’s delightfully absurd and singularly Swedish. Bengt Nilsson brings just the right amount of loner intensity to Amadeus; Sven Ahlstrom neatly complements as Amadeus’ brother Oscar, golden boy and admired conductor. It’s also nicely lit by cinematographer Charlotta Tengroth.

“Sound of Noise” is the first feature from Simonsson and Stjärne Nilsson. Their previous work includes the acclaimed shorts “Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers” (2001), “Way of the Flounder” (2005) and “Woman and Gramophone” (2006).

“Sound of Noise” opens Friday, March 9, in New York, LA and Seattle. Over the next several weeks, it will play in select cities; check local listings for details. The filmmakers will be at Cinefamily (611 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles, 90036, 323-655-2510) on Friday, March 9, and Saturday, March 10, for Q&As. Additionally, on Friday, Cinefamily will host an opening party featuring a live drum battle with co-director Ola Simonsson and Melvins’ drummers, Dale Crover and Coady Willis.

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Strong acting, stellar cast can’t save ‘Rampart’

February 10, 2012 by

Rampart/2011/Millennium Entertainment/108 min.

“This used to be a glorious soldiers’ department,” says Woody Harrelson as dirty LA cop and Vietnam vet Dave Brown early on in “Rampart” by director Oren Moverman.

He’s right. Beset by the Rampart scandal, the LAPD in 1999 is anything but glorious. And corrupt, bloodthirsty, womanizing, racist Dave is anything but sympathetic. Dave’s also oddly verbose at times, perhaps signaling that he isn’t as smart as he thinks he is.

The best part of “Rampart” is the strong acting by Harrelson and the rest of the cast – Ned Beatty, Ben Foster, Robin Wright, Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon, Sigourney Weaver, Ice Cube, and a cameo from Steve Buscemi.

Despite the formidable acting, there’s scant character development, a turbid storyline and gimmicky camerawork. Sometimes the script, by Moverman and James Ellroy, just thuds. When Dave meets Linda (Wright) in a bar, his opening gambit is: “You’re wearing a courtroom suit and you have litigator eyes.” Really?

And when Beatty’s character, an ex-bad-cop, meets Dave in a library, he tells him: “I don’t play games. I don’t name names.”

As much as I wanted to like “Rampart,” I found the film unpleasant to watch. Granted, it is unpleasant subject matter, but dramatically this is a letdown. I had high hopes for “Rampart” because I admired Harrelson and Moverman’s excellent movie “The Messenger” from 2009. For really sizzling neo-noir stories of police corruption, give me “L.A. Confidential” (based on Ellroy’s novel) or “Serpico” anytime.

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Compelling but flawed ‘Kill List’ melds drama, thriller, horror

February 4, 2012 by

Kill List/2011/IFC Midnight/95 min.

“Kill List” is a resonant film that demands your attention with its oblique weirdness and darkly alluring characters, but in the end doesn’t live up to its full storytelling potential.

An ambitious mix of genres, the film is divided into three parts – it begins with fly-on-the-wall family drama, segues into a black-humor thriller about two matter-of-factly brutal hitmen and culminates in full-on horror centering on a furtive, frightening cult. But while the first two thirds of the movie are richly atmospheric and unusually compelling (there’s an intense realism to the acting), the final chapter feels disappointingly banal.

“Kill List” has real spontaneity in the performances though, perhaps because director Ben Wheatley co-wrote the script with Amy Jump specifically for the actors, then encouraged them to improvise. That, said Wheatley at a round-table interview Friday in West Hollywood, gave the film sweeter, funnier moments than he had in the script.

MyAnna Buring

Neil Maskell plays Jay, an English hitman figuring out his next step, several months after a job went wrong in Kiev. An average Joe with a pudgy face and love handles, Jay might just as easily be a used-car salesman or an insurance agent who has hit a dry patch and needs to pull in some cash.

Tension simmers between Jay and his wife Shel (MyAnna Buring, an icy Hitchcockian blonde). Their young son Sam (Harry Simpson) winces when his parents fight, which is frequently.

Jay’s work prospects look brighter after a visit from his friend, goofy-looking Gal (Michael Smiley) and his smoldering girlfriend Fiona (Emma Fryer). Jay and Gal, despite their apparent inefficiency in Kiev, are entrusted with a new assignment. The victims accumulate, Jay’s grasp on reality is increasingly tenuous and the hitmen are drawn into the workings of the cult.

Wheatley, who also directed the 2009 crime comedy “Down Terrace,” has a penchant for ’70s films. In “Kill List,” he said, he had elements of these films on his radar: “Race with the Devil,” “The Wicker Man,” “The Parallax View,” and “The Manchurian Candidate” as well as the work of directors John Cassavetes (“Faces”) and Alan Clarke (“Scum”).

As for the genre-bending in “Kill List,” Wheatley said he front-loaded the film with characterizations so the last part would work. “Knowing who these people are amplifies the violence and you’re primed for the crazy horror.”

All well and good. Except that, despite laying the groundwork, the horror seemed more half-baked than truly disturbing. But that’s just me. Pointing out that much of the film’s violence is implicit – imagined and defined by viewers – Wheatley said, “You look at the film and the film looks at you. Your own prejudices come out. [The film] puts a weird curse on the audience.”

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‘Man on a Ledge’ falls squarely into the realm of the absurd

January 31, 2012 by

Man on a Ledge/2012/Summit Entertainment/102 min.

By Michael Wilmington

“Man on a Ledge,” a thriller about a man clinging to a 21st-story ledge, while Manhattan goes wild below him, is a real mind-boggler – not because of any hair-raising suspense but because the story is so ridiculous that, despite a high-octane cast, it’s capable of putting you into a state of befuddled exasperation and disbelief.

“Man on a Ledge” has that slick, self-satisfied gleam movies can get when they cost too much and they’re stuffed with formula and clichés and stars. The picture’s constantly accelerating absurdities suggest that the filmmakers assume their audience will swallow anything. It also has a plot so preposterous, motivations so inane and an ending so bonkers that the best way to play them would be for laughs, if the show were good at comedy (which it isn’t).

Consider the premise. A tough ex-cop named Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) is in jail, framed for a $40 million diamond robbery from a Donald Trump-like financier named David Englander (Ed Harris). Nick escapes from custody while on a furlough to attend his father’s funeral, then checks into the Roosevelt Hotel, orders breakfast and crawls out the window onto the ledge, 21 stories above the street.

Soon, he attracts a crowd, as well as police (his buddy Mike played by Anthony Mackie and the cynical Jack played by Edward Burns), along with a vain, callous TV news reporter Suzie Morales (Kyra Sedgwick), and a lusty but conscientious crisis negotiator, Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks), who tries a little harder than Jack to talk Nick back inside.

It doesn’t work. Nick keeps refusing to get off his ledge while talking in a curious accent that suggests an Australian trying to impersonate a New York City Irish-American. (Couldn’t Worthington get some lessons from Burns?)

Why, you might wonder, does somebody break out of prison in order to jump out of a hotel window? Good question. (There are many more.) It turns out that the episode we’re watching is not a real suicide attempt, but an elaborate diversion, intended to preoccupy the police and everyone else.

Meanwhile, across the street, Nick’s live-wire brother Joey (Jamie Bell) and Joey’s hottie partner Angie (Genesis Rodriguez) break into Englander’s suite, where they’re convinced the $40 million diamond is still lying around somewhere and will exonerate Nick, if they can find it. In other words, the “jump” is staged as part of a robbery intended to clear the “jumper” of a conviction for another robbery of the very same diamond. Got that?

Why this outrageously silly heist is committed during the day, after a huge crowd, police and media have been pulled into the area by the phony suicide, or why Nick didn’t do his ledge routine somewhere else farther away, remains another of the show’s endless mysteries.

“Man on a Ledge” is director Asger Leth’s first fiction feature – he’s done an admired documentary called “Ghosts of City Soleil” – and he makes the movie slick and fast. (Pablo F. Fenjves wrote the script.) Ludicrous, yes, but it’s never boring, and the sheer, uninspired phoniness and preposterousness almost command a perverse respect, though, to tell the truth, I couldn’t wait to leave.

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‘Marnie’ is a complex, thoughtful and satisfying story

January 30, 2012 by

Marnie/1964/Universal Pictures/130 min.

In honor of Tippi Hedren’s 82nd birthday earlier this month (Jan. 19), I’m running this review of “Marnie.” In 1983, Hedren, a Minnesota native of Scandinavian descent, founded the Roar Foundation to support abandoned exotic felines at the Shambala Preserve in Acton, Calif.

Most cynics have romantic souls and if there’s one Hitchcock film that works on this premise it’s “Marnie.” Though the legendary auteur frequently featured redemptive, romantic endings, here a pair of feuding lovers must work through many an issue before they hit happily ever after. It’s also a portrait of a wayward woman struggling with a tortured psyche, stemming from an unresolved childhood trauma.

Marnie (Tippi Hedren) and Mark (Sean Connery) must work through many an issue.

In the opening scene we meet impeccably dressed, raven-haired career girl Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren) carrying a citron-colored handbag that’s as covetable today as it was in 1964. (Hedren starred in Hitchcock’s “The Birds” one year earlier.)

Marnie has just finished doing what she does best: stealing from her employer, then donning a new disguise so she can pull the same scam at another company.

Besides her sizable clothing and hair-color budget, Marnie wants money to give to her poor frumpy Mama (Louise Latham), telling her: “That’s what money’s for. To spend.” (Especially when it’s someone else’s cash.) But despite these handouts, which Marnie personally delivers, Mama’s uptight and hard to please, preferring to lavish her attention on a little girl from the neighborhood (Kimberly Beck) instead of on her daughter.

At her next job, Marnie sports auburn up-do’s and sensible shoes. It’s here that she meets devastatingly handsome businessman Mark Rutland (Sean Connery). Intense and domineering, Mark is quickly smitten but ice-queen Marnie has no interest in him or in any man, though she does weaken long enough to kiss him.

Diane Baker plays sassy Lil.

Not so impressed with Marnie is Mark’s sharp, sassy sister-in-law Lil (Diane Baker). Packed with interesting women, the cast also includes Mariette Hartley as Marnie’s office colleague and Melody Thomas Scott as young Marnie.

Marnie’s coldness just makes Mark more determined – he is used to getting what he wants – and once he finds out about her criminal past, he uses this info to hasten their marriage.

The fact that Marnie can’t stand his touch doesn’t make for the most romantic honeymoon. Perhaps if he were a tad less controlling …

Will Mark help Marnie confront her past before her spate of Dior-collar crime catches up with her? That’s the movie’s source of suspense. It’s loosely based on a novel by Winston Graham but Hitchcock typically used the literary source material as merely a starting point to create a tension-filled, sometimes terrifying, reality and render his unique vision. The script came from Jay Presson Allen, a former actress and writer, who also worked with Sidney Lumet.

Hitchcock enjoyed exploring psychosexual theory in his films, sometimes with a smirk, sometimes not. In this case, Dr. Hitch diagnoses frigidity, rescue fantasies, control issues bordering on obsession, repressed memories and of course a major power struggle.

The movie was trashed upon its release. Critics called Hitchcock sloppy and unfairly pounced on Hedren’s acting. The editing is occasionally choppy, some of the backdrops look fake, the screen goes red when Marnie sees the color red, there are thunderstorms aplenty. Though they might seem flawed or slightly old-hat, these noirish devices reflect Marnie’s off-kilter world, her confused and anguished psychological state.

And Hitchcock’s personality was too controlling and perfectionistic to have coasted through this movie. Conscious of every detail of every frame, he sometimes shopped for and selected accessories like hats and handbags because even these seemingly minor visual elements affected the color palette of each shot. He also wanted classic lines for the clothes so that in years to come they wouldn’t look dated.

Always engaging, sometimes thrilling, “Marnie” is a complex, thoughtful and satisfying story.

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‘Marnie’ quick hit

January 30, 2012 by

Marnie/1964/Universal Pictures/130 min.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie,” a twisted rescue fantasy meets a pretty passel of repressed memories. The wannabe rescuer is intense, domineering and drop-dead gorgeous Mark Rutland (Sean Connery). His damsel in distress, and often in disguise, is chic thief Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren), still dogged by a childhood trauma. Marnie is determined to buy a few new dresses for her fashion-challenged Mama (Louise Latham), just as Hitch was determined to make Tippi his new Grace Kelly. Always engaging, sometimes thrilling, “Marnie” is a complex, thoughtful and satisfying story.

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‘Miss Bala’ exudes anti-Hollywood, anti-glamour realism

January 20, 2012 by

Miss Bala/2011/Canana Films/113 min.

“Miss Bala” is a grisly tale of crime and corruption, a grim neo-noir that chooses not to temper the darkness with snazzy visuals, sympathetic characters or sly one-liners.

The film starts with Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman) posing in front of a mirror adorned with cut-outs from magazines; she imagines a glossy, improbable future that will whisk her away from her hardscrabble life in poverty-stricken Baja, a Mexican border city. Her potential escape is entering the Miss Baja California beauty pageant with her best friend Suzu. (Bala is a play on the word for bullet.)

Laura’s dream veers crazily off course when she agrees to go to a nightclub with Suzu the night before their audition. Amid the tacky lights and cranking music, armed men barge in and shoot dozens of patrons. Laura survives but cannot find Suzu; her attempt to re-connect throws her into the violent nightmare world of a drug lord named Lino (Noe Hernandez) who puts her to work for his gang. After completing smaller jobs, she crosses the border to exchange money for weapons with a corrupt U.S. officer.

Meanwhile, Lino uses his pervasive influence to ensure that Laura wins the beauty-pageant crown. Laura/Miss Baja is introduced to the general of the Mexican police at a formal event, which serves as the backdrop for another deadly ambush and an ironic climax.

Based on true events (outlined in a 2008 newspaper story), “Miss Bala” is Mexico’s entry for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. The film exudes anti-Hollywood, anti-glamour hyper-realism. We learn little about these opaque characters’ inner lives and dialogue is uncommonly spare. In fact, we never see drugs or hear them mentioned.

“These gangsters aren’t cool, going to parties and wearing gold,” said director Gerardo Naranjo at a round-table interview last week in Santa Monica. “These guys are living a pathetic life.”

This restraint and realism extends to the look of the film as well, with long takes, minimal editing and an absence of close-ups. Naranjo said he did not look to other movies or directors for stylistic inspiration. Instead, he said, everything in the story had to pass though a logic filter. How would it feel? How would it happen in terms of logic?

“Miss Bala” is told mostly from Laura’s point of view and she is very much a victim, one who believes that fighting back is pointless. Naranjo says this reflects the fact that Mexico is frozen with fear about drug cartels and their enormous power. Laura is a metaphor for fearful Mexican society, he says, even if that passivity might sometimes alienate the audience.

On a dramatic level, the lack of pushback does spur frustration. Though we feel sorry for Laura, it’s hard to connect emotionally with her. For her to resist would incur great risk, it’s true, but in terms of telling a story and melding realism with art, it would have been more dramatically satisfying, more soul-touching, if she’d tried. Despite that frustration, “Miss Bala” is a unique, gripping ride through a dark and dangerous world.

“Miss Bala” opens today in LA and New York.

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Does ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ need Noomi Rapace to survive?

December 27, 2011 by

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/2011/Columbia Pictures/158 min.

By Michael Wilmington

Noomi Rapace

When it comes to playing dark heroines with burning eyes, black jackets, multiple piercings and deadly temperaments, Rooney Mara is alas no Noomi Rapace. But the American actress (Rooney), who put down Jesse Eisenberg so effectively in “The Social Network,” proves surprisingly adept at putting down (and messing up) chauvinists and uncovering serial killers in Noomi’s old role of hacker/heroine Lisbeth Salander, in David Fincher’s remake of the Swedish sensation, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

It’s a very effective Hollywood movie as well, even if it’s one that, at least for “Dragon Tattoo” veterans, has few surprises. That’s because director Fincher (“The Social Network,” “Zodiac,” “Se7en”) and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”) stay remarkably faithful to the original novels and the three hit Swedish movies made from the books.

Lisbeth of course is the astonishingly anti-social but utterly compelling heroine of the late Swedish journalist/novelist Stieg Larsson’s worldwide best-sellers: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played with Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.”

Those novels, all published posthumously, follow the investigations of fictional journalist Mikael Blomkvist (a character many feel was modeled on Larsson) into the mysterious disappearance, 40 years earlier, of Harriet Vanger, beloved great-niece of Mikael’s employer, Henrik Vanger. The elite Vanger clan has many skeletons rattling around in their mansion closets.

In turn, Mikael (played in the original Swedish films by Michael Nyqvist and by Daniel Craig in Fincher’s film) hires the unorthodox Lisbeth as his researcher because of her incredible Internet skills. Soon the two are swimming in a whirlpool of family secrets, scandal and dread – a multi-plotted terror trap that Larsson kept up though all three of the novels.

Some critics have complained that Fincher and Zaillian haven’t changed the story enough. But it should be obvious by now that the vast audience for these stories doesn’t want them changed.

Hewing to the original as much as possible: That was super-producer David O. Selznick’s rule on adapting beloved best-sellers and classics to the screen, from “David Copperfield” to “Gone with the Wind” to “Rebecca.” And Selznick was usually right.

The more important things about the new “Dragon Tattoo” are that it’s been smartly and deftly adapted, extremely well cast, and beautifully and excitingly filmed. The movie has serious themes, a strong social/political dimension and engaging characters as well as an intricately assembled and finely crafted story that’s also pulpily lurid. Overall, it’s the sort of intelligent entertainment we don’t usually get from blockbusters.

Adding greatly to that intelligence, and to the entertainment value, is the new film’s excellent cast. In addition to Mara and Craig, there’s Robin Wright as Mikael’s editor-lover Erika (the original’s Lena Endre role), Christopher Plummer as Mikael’s employer, Henrik Vanger; the always-superb Stellan Skarsgard as genial Martin Vanger; Joely Richardson and Geraldine James as Vanger family members Anita and Cecilia; Steven Berkoff as the dour family attorney Dirch Frode; and Yorick Van Wageningen as Bjurman, Lisbeth’s amoral nemesis and subject of the trilogy’s most shocking and notorious scenes: the rape and anti-rape.

Why do murder mysteries and detective yarns, film noirs and neo noirs, still captivate audiences, usually the smarter audiences, so intensely? Perhaps it’s because the best of these stories imply that the world, in all its mysterious tangles, can be fathomed – that justice, in all its vagaries, is not as fragile as it sometimes seems, that life’s chaos and horrors can be straightened out or at least understood.

That’s the appeal of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” in all its forms: as addictive novels, as arty foreign films and now as a Hollywood blockbuster. It’s a movie that doesn’t really need Noomi to survive, though it’s nice to know that she’s still around. And that Lisbeth still has her tattoo.

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Roman Polanski, master of anxiety, is the perfect director for tense ‘Carnage’

December 16, 2011 by

Carnage/2011/Sony Pictures Classics/80 min.

By Michael Wilmington

“Carnage” shows us once again what a master Roman Polanski is of the claustrophobia of anxiety – even though this time the fear he paints is more comic and light-hearted than the sheer grinding terror of say, “Repulsion” or “Rosemary’s Baby.” In his new movie, which was adopted by the Iranian-French writer Yasmina Reza from her hit play “God of Carnage,” director Polanski traps us, once again, in close quarters and, once again also, in a tense game and battle of social intercourse that is going to degenerate into absurdity and cruelty.

We are in the well-appointed Brooklyn apartment of the Longstreets: genial, rough-looking Michael (John C. Reilly), a salesman, and high-strung Penelope (Jodie Foster), a writer. Michael and Penelope have invited over a couple they don’t know – Alan and Nancy Cowan (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet), a corporate lawyer and an investment broker – to discuss the playground fracas between their respective sons, Ethan and Zachary (played by Eliot Berger and Polanski’s own son Elvis). The Cowan boy attacked the Longstreet kid and broke some teeth.

Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz.

There’s tension right from the start, despite the atmosphere of good-natured civility and manners, and writer Reza and Polanski nurse it along expertly. Michael, whose eyes glower while his mouth grins, is a bit too friendly, and too loudly obliging. We sense that, though he’s talking the talk, he’s no liberal. Penelope, the real bleeding heart of the two, is wired tight, more and more uneasy and nervous.

Alan, slick, conniving and full of lightly veiled disdain for his social inferiors (almost everybody, but especially the Longstreets), keeps rudely interrupting the confab to bark orders over his cell phone. As for Nancy, she keeps her feelings tightly reined in, until the memorable moment when she suddenly projectile-vomits all over the Longstreet’s coffee table and Penelope’s treasured book of Kokoschka reproductions. From there it gets worse, and uglier, and funnier.

I’ve never seen the play, but I’m not surprised it’s an international critical and audience hit. The model, of course, is Edward Albee’s venom-laced, acidly funny chamber drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and the play that probably influenced Albee: Eugene O’Neill’s great tragic family drama “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

As in those two 20th century theater classics, “God of Carnage” (I prefer that title) gives us a small group of people, all hiding something, all gradually losing their inhibitions and their secrets, as they consume more and more booze.

So, one could use “Carnage” as a springboard for little essays on class warfare or the discreet charmlessness of the bourgeoisie or the beast that lies beneath all our skins or even on cell-phone etiquette. (What’s Alan like when he’s driving?) Or one could delve into the symbolism of the Longstreets’ lost hamster, a hapless creature who may be the equivalent for George and Martha’s “lost” child in “Virginia Woolf.” But, after 15 minutes of watching this filmed play, I knew why it had gotten all its awards, why Polanski wanted to do it and why he was the ideal director for the piece. [Read more…]

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‘Cook County’ revels in atmosphere, skimps on story

December 16, 2011 by

Cook County/2009/Hannover House/93 min.

First-time writer/director David Pomes says he filmed “Cook County” in a way that would take the audience into the dismal world of crystal meth users in the woods of East Texas. True to his aim, the film does seem to live and breathe a sweaty, strung-out realness.

Ryan Donowho

Bump (Anson Mount) heads the household, which means he uses heavily, holds parties and snarls orders. His brother Sonny (Xander Berkeley), newly released from prison, struggles to stay clean and to reconnect with his 17-year-old son, wary and watchful Abe (Ryan Donowho). Bump and Sonny’s ghostlike father (Tommy Townsend) listlessly awaits his next hit.

It falls to Abe to take care of Bump’s little girl Deandra (Makenna Fitzsimmons) and protect her from her father, who’s not above bragging that he could put a bullet in her head if he wanted to. As Bump grows increasingly paranoid and unhinged, Abe must commit a fearsome act in order to keep Deandra safe.

Pomes skillfully evokes not just the “party” atmosphere but the bleak day-to-day existence of these desperate, seemingly doomed men. (Director of photography Brad Rushing used Super 16mm handheld for much the movie.) The writing is good and Pomes elicits authentic performances from his cast.

Mount nearly glows with menace as he becomes increasingly disconnected from reality. Berkeley brings scruffy amiability and lambent hopefulness to his part. Sonny wants something better but sees few ways out. Donowho is expressive and interesting to watch.

Unfortunately, once at the party, there’s not much to do. Yes, we see tension simmer between the brothers. We witness father/son confrontations. Beyond that, however, the plot is fairly thin. If you’ve never seen “Breaking Bad” or read about the problem of crystal-meth addiction, “Cook County” will open your eyes. But eye-opening realism and banjo music does not a story make.

“Cook County” opens today in LA and New York; it will play elsewhere starting Jan. 27.

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