(4.5/5)

Every festival I look for one little indie feature to fall in love with; it’s kind of a crapshoot choosing low-budget indies with no distribution, no known actors (or non-actors), first-time directors. You can get some real duds, or things that have promise but end up disappointing. But you can also find some gems, and playing the scheduling dice at festivals is often the only way to find them. Last year, The New Year was the tiny indie I fell in love with at LAFF. This year, The Dynamiter is likely to wear the distinction.

Fourteen-year-old Robbie Hendrick is the de facto head of his Mississippi family, caring for his 8-year-old half-brother Fez and his nearly-senile grandmother in the absence of his mother, who has left them temporarily for reasons never fully explained. He never knew his father. Forced to grow up early, Robbie isn’t a model citizen, stealing from classmates when he gets the chance – but the principal allows him the opportunity to write an essay or story over summer vacation rather than kicking him out of school. That essay becomes a series of letters to the teacher that Robbie speaks in voiceover at intervals throughout the film, which have a homespun poetic quality to them that I found extremely moving. Meanwhile, his older brother Lucas comes to hang around, having been kicked out of college (on a football scholarship), and generally provides a negative influence.

The story of the film is simple, just a few weeks in this kid’s life, but it has a lyrical quality that elevates it into something much more. Robbie seems destined to follow in his brother’s footsteps, doing poorly in school, getting in fights, stealing, etc., but he’s an extremely sympathetic character, trying to do the best he can for his family. He plays in the fields with Fez in the opening scene, perfectly happy to play soldiers and tell jokes with his little brother (the scene is recalled with great affect toward the end of the film), but he’ll also get up before dawn to go work at a gas station for what menial wages he can get to keep the household afloat. And he mentors Fez as well, teaching him manners and courtesy as well as a good work ethic. Despite Lucas’s bad example, Robbie is a fundamentally different person, even if he doesn’t always do the right thing.

The filmmaking quality belies the fact that Matthew Gordon has only directed one short before this, and that the whole cast is made up of non-actor Mississippi locals. William Ruffin is subdued but effective and naturalistic as Robbie, while Patrick Rutherford manages to make you both dislike Lucas and also feel sorry for the place he’s come to in life, basically thinking he can’t be anything else. Meanwhile, John Alex Nunnery very nearly steals the show as Fez, but Ruffin is strong enough to hold his own against the adorableness. Both Rutherford and Nunnery were at the screening and hope to keep acting; I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for them.

Every moment in the film rings true, with the camaraderie between Robbie and Fez the emotional center of the film, but extending to Robbie’s other relationships, both good and bad. Even the few scenes showing the boys with their grandmother draw a meaningful picture of this family. It’s this emotional honesty of the script meshed with the performances from the three boys that grounds this film, which could so easily have gone into depressing or maudlin territory. Instead, it’s both realistic and beautiful, it looks great, and instead of being depressed, I just wanted to spend longer with Robbie and Fez in their version of Mississippi (and my mom being from Alabama, I have no great love for Mississippi). In terms of a non-depressive vision of a depressing situation, the film is not far off from Fish Tank, though it doesn’t have the explosive quality of that film, despite the title (no, I’m not sure what it means, either). It’s more contemplative and easy-going than that. The film is a brief 73 minutes. I could have stayed with them twice that long.

Director: Matthew Gordon
Screenplay: Brad Ingelsby
Producers: Matthew Gordon, Kevin Abrams, Mike Jones, Nate Tuck, Amile Wilson, Art Jones, Merilee Holt
Starring: William Patrick Ruffin, John Alex Nunnery, Patrick Rutherford, Joyce Baldwin
Running Time: 73 min
Country/Language: USA, English
US Theatrical Release Date: no distribution