Lucky Them

Charming, funny, lively, moving — all the requirements for a complete and satisfying film experience can be found in Megan Griffiths's latest, set within the world of Seattle's indie music scene. Lucky Them introduces us to Ellie Klug (Toni Collette, also at the Festival in Enough Said), a veteran journalist for a music publication. Talented but hapless, appealing and irritating in equal measure, Ellie is immobilized by unaddressed issues from her past that have returned for an unexpected encore.

Ellie is called up one day by her intrepid editor Giles (Oliver Platt), a man badly in need of an attention-grabbing cover story. He asks Ellie to investigate the ten-year-old disappearance of a revered local musician — who also happened to be Ellie's long-time boyfriend at the time he went missing. Having not produced anything of note lately, and knowing her job is on the line, Ellie reluctantly agrees to take the assignment, even as her erratic, booze-soaked relationships with younger musicians continue to clutter her life. She convinces herself there will be no need to unlock her own crippling emotional baggage around her lover's departure and her sense of having been abandoned. For the road trip, she grudgingly accepts the companionship of music-hating, aspiring documentarian Charlie (Thomas Haden Church), whose confusion regarding matters of the heart is only matched by his inept filmmaking.

Lucky Them is about how we mythologize those we love — especially those we have lost — and how this skewed idolatry impedes anything new and hopeful. The semiautobiographical nature of co-screenwriter Emily Wachtel's story undoubtedly gives the film its emotional edge, and, combined with Griffiths's crisp direction and her cast's sharply observant performances, the result is nothing less than one of the most enjoyable films of the year.

Jane Schoettle