My wife and I went to Night Moves at Angelika with fairly limited expectations. Jesse Eisenberg is not a favorite of ours, but Dakota Fanning is a favorite of ours, and Peter Scarsgard is usually a pretty good quantity in films as well, and we hoped it would at least be a somewhat tense and exciting thriller. Night Moves actually exceeded our expectations by a good bit, but not in a way we expected.

The film was actually not that much of a thriller, but it wound up being a nice little portrait of earthy-crunchy, social activist hippies (both crazy and sane) living in yurts the middle of nowhere, struggling to survive, and resenting almost everyone. The three main characters become fixated on a small, aging dam on a local river, and decide to blow it up as a way to strike back at yuppies who, in Eisenberg’s words, only care about powering their iPods. It’s a ridiculous notion, to be sure, but one that both contains a (tiny) gain of truth, and which also comes across as very believable sentiment for rural, agricultural people living a disconnected, oppressed existence. When they do bomb it, something goes wrong, and their little world starts to unravel.

There are some really nice things in this film. The mental dissolution of the three is captured really well, as are their varied attempts to cope with their horrible situation. The culture of life out on a self-sustaining bio-dynamic farm is even more beautifully captured – indeed, the juxtaposition of this life with the violent political delusions of the three main characters is quite fascinating to ponder. The dialog is a little skimpy, but what is there is well-written, and Eisenberg, Fanning, and Scarsgard give excellent, understated performances, as do all the supporting actors.

Night Moves is well worth catching, if you like a slow, brooding sociopolitical movie that is also an interesting character study. I definitely recommend it.