January is a really dull time at the movies, with theaters endlessly hanging on to all the (mostly shitty) Oscar hopefuls in pursuit of easy, guaranteed revenue streams. Even my favorite off-beat theater, Cinema Village, is doing this to a certain extent. But this week Cinema Village opened a new movie which will kick off the 2014 review year here at Irreviews, an obscure Anna Paquin film called Free Ride. At the 7:00 show there was only me and one other person in the theater, but a bag-person did walk-in half way through and camp out, so I guess you could say it drew a prime-time audience of three!

Free Ride is a bit of a throwback to the Indie Renaissance of the 90’s, and a very enjoyable one. It reminded me a bit of certain works by Victor Nunez, Coastlines and Ulee’s Gold, in its simple, unadorned narrative style and its themes of bleak working-class struggle in the American south, and the always present temptation of criminality, not as a means to get rich, but as a means to merely get by. Free Ride is a true story about a young, single mother of two (Anna Paquin) living in shit somewhere in Ohio and getting beaten up by her boyfriend on a regular basis, who moves her family to Florida and connects with a friend who’s sets her up working for a medium-size, regional drug kingpin. She starts to get her feet under her, but by the very nature of her employment solution it is of course doomed to be transitory.

This film was definitely made on a shoestring budget (one “hospital” scene was clearly shot in some motel,) but the elements of the film come together well enough that you don’t really care. The story is engaging and smartly paced, and all the performances (Paquin and her no-name supporting cast) are quite strong and very natural; the film was clearly well-directed. The dialog may be limited, but it’s well-crafted and efficient, and combined with good scene structuring the viewer connects with the various characters, even the minor ones, and is consistently immersed in the story. The score for the film was actually kind of remarkable: a hodgepodge of presumably modern songs (if they’re really from the 70’s, I’ve certainly never heard them) that half sounded like 70’s music and half sounded like the spaced-out scores one used to hear in 90’s indie films; that description sounds a bit horrid, I know, but whatever strange genera of music they were inventing, the songs are surprisingly pleasing, and fit the mood of the film excellently.

The other really striking thing about this film is its ending, which is a brief monologue from the real-life women who’s played by Anna Paquin in the film, explaining that in a society that does so little for struggling segments of the population, people are sometimes going to turn to crime simply out of love for their dependents (she didn’t say it quite that succinctly, but that was the general idea.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen this kind of thing in a movie, and while I’m not sure I loved the device, it was a bit gutsy and it certainly did not spoil my memory of the film.

Lastly, brava to Anna Paquin for getting involved in this little film, and not only lending her talent and star power to the lead role, but also producing the film as well. I really respect actors and actresses who have the guts to do interesting work, rather than merely chase fame, money and awards all the time.

Free Ride will almost certainly be gone from Cinema Village by Friday, so if you want to catch it, go tonight or tomorrow night. I would certainly recommend it, if you like old-school indie films.