Sundance Roundup: The Best of 2008

Another voice in the din was that of Lance Hammer, the writer-director of Ballast. His movie doesn't just bring three troubled characters in the Mississippi Delta to rich, gnarled, vivid life — it presents them as enigmas who come into focus moment by moment, scene by scene, in a journey of discovery that forces us to cast off the clichés of race, poverty, and existence in the Deep South.

It's become knee-jerk to call something ''the real-life Spinal Tap,'' but there are moments when Anvil! The Story of Anvil really is. It's a documentary about the greatest heavy-metal band you've never heard of — a crew of Canadian headbangers who came up during the demon-thrash wave of the early '80s, then went nowhere. Anvil! catches up with their two lead members, who were gypped by fate, and it takes the measure of metal stardom: To be a legend in your own mind is to wear, rather than smell, the glove. So many great documentaries play at Sundance that, in fact, there's a fascination to seeing docs that don't work. I wasn't alone in hoping that Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, the latest from Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), might shed light on the location of the globe's most wanted man. But the Michael Moore roving-boob-with-a-camera approach backfires into banality. The film should have been called The Post-9/11 World for Dummies. And Patti Smith: Dream of Life is a woozy art ramble, treating the rag-doll punk priestess' 1970s heyday as if it were some trivial prelude to her middle age.

If you're wondering what qualifies an era for nostalgia, here's an easy answer: when it's depicted with affectionate period-piece distance in a movie at Sundance. Jonathan Levine's The Wackness is a studiously offbeat coming-of-age romance set in New York during the long-ago, faraway days of...1994. It's about a teen drug dealer (Josh Peck) who becomes buddies with his shrink, a pothead played by Ben Kingsley with a ''New York'' accent somewhere between Brooklynese and Hungarian. Kingsley has fun as this ornery guru-codger, and people had fun watching him (the movie won an audience award), even if he's never quite a credible person.

I preferred Christine Jeffs' Sunshine Cleaning, which makes something fresh out of something queasy. It stars Amy Adams (sweetness and light) and Emily Blunt (spicy and dark) as sisters who go into business, cleaning up homes where folks have died, leaving a trail of bodily fluids. (Yes, it's a little gross — which is part of the fun.) The two aren't just scrubbing away blood, they're cleaning up wasted lives, and finding a screwy purpose in it. Another quiet winner was Sugar, the second film from Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson), about a baseball player from the Dominican Republic — a pitcher (Algenis Perez Soto) with a baby face and a killer curve — who gets drafted into the American minor leagues. Boden and Fleck work with a touching integrity that, I admit, left me wishing for a hint of rah-rah vulgarity.

An addictive portrait of seniors at a high school in Indiana, American Teen shows the tropes of reality TV now invading ''serious'' documentaries. A lot of folks thought it was stagy and fake, but director Nanette Burstein digs so tellingly into her subjects' emotional lives that the film, to me, felt like a richly packed novel.

And then there was Hamlet 2. If you're a fan of Steve Coogan, the King Leer of British comics, you won't want to miss this broad, loony-tunes spin on Waiting for Guffman, in which Coogan turns a self-loathing high school drama teacher into a loser-geek of genius. He stages a sequel to Hamlet, and it's a high school musical that would make John Waters proud — a demolition derby of bad taste. At Sundance 2008, that's what independence looked like.

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