At the center are four friends who decide to visit their favorite distilleries on the bluegrass bourbon trail, retracing a course they embarked on ten years earlier. While stopping by a personally significant distillery (one that's since been converted into a beer place, alas) they hear of a stash of bootlegging loot that's supposedly buried in the Bullitt County woods, and decide to go find it. And as you can imagine, things don't go as planned.
Intertwined with their treasure hunt is a personal story about guilt, sin and repression. The film's main character Gordie (Mike C. Nelson), a Vietnam veteran, is afflicted by PTSD—not from his military experience (he got sent home before he saw action), but from something horrible that happened to him stateside a decade ago, in the company of the trio he's traveling with now: Robin (Jenni Melear), a guitar-strumming wiseass; her even bigger wiseass of a boyfriend Keaton (David McCracken), who always seems to say and do the worst thing at the worst time; and Wayne (Napoleon Ryan), a soft-spoken Englishman who mostly hovers on the periphery and interjects commentary on Gordie's choices, and whose look and body language faintly recall a young Art Garfunkel.
Along the way, the group meets eccentric locals, played by character actors who make their roles pop even when they have a couple of scenes or a handful of lines. The performers go the extra kilometer to make every character's choice feel spontaneous and real, even when they're just doing whatever the movie needs them to do to set up the next big moment. The most impressive are Richard Riehle and Dorothy Lyman as an older married couple who offer hospitality to the foursome. They have John Ford faces.
McCracken is a sharp director of uncomfortable conversations and emotional assaults as well as beatings and killings. He, his cinematographer Sean McDaniel, and his editor Kevin Del Colle always try to present things in a way that's elegant and surprising but not pointlessly showy, in the manner of a classic Hollywood movie from a time when every camera move, even in bad films, was meaningful, or tried to be. My favorite occurs when violence erupts in a small room, and the movie holds on a long closeup of a shocked, blood-spattered character in the foreground while the kitchen window in the background forms a frame-within-a-frame that other major characters gather within.
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