Movie Nation

“The Reliant” probably played better in 2019, when it came out (VOD) than it does today on Netflix.

Why? It’s a trigger-happy faith-based survivalist thriller. A couple of weekends of pot-bellied, camo-wearing AK-47 brandishing rubes with “I need a haircut” signs in public kind of did for ultra-conservative survivalism what “Let them drink disinfectant” did to the “Stable Genius” — removed all credibility and any room for doubt that they’re entitled to any.

This is a nutty fable about civil breakdown, a family whose surgeon dad (Kevin Sorbo) has made them live by the Boy Scout Motto (“Be prepared”) and what happens to all those kids when dad is the first one gunned-down as the bikers turn rioters and all hell breaks loose.

A lot of debating is what happens. Because as they take arms and try to TCB, one (adult) child keeps preaching, “Thou shalt not kill” is in the Bible, no matter what the Russian-financed NRA wants you to believe.

The doctor (Sorbo) takes care of a little girl in his ER after her drunk-driving redneck daddy (Brian Bosworth) almost kills her.

Cut to some time later and riots are all over the TV, the doc’s family now includes that little girl, and guess who biker-daddy comes looking for when law and order breaks down?

Dad and oldest son Jimmy (Blake Burt) barely have time to load up at the gun shop before the mobs break in.

“Gun shop as last bastion of democracy” is entirely too subtle for this script. Let’s cast C-movie loon Eric Roberts as the owner, fighting to Make America Gun-Crazy Again.

It’s “bug out” time at home, but Dad has no sooner told the wife (Julia Denton), five kids and daughter Sophie’s fiance (Josh Murray) that “We are prepared for this” and “my priority is to keep you all SAFE” when he takes one from a sniper rifle.

Damn. And he was just rushing back in to empty out the gun safe!

Parentless, the story degenerates to low-grade camping (nearby, in case Mom returns) and living off the strife-torn land, with endless debates between just-got-my-first-gun Jimmy, 21, and Sophie (Mollee Gray of “A Night to Regret”), a “turn the other cheek” Christian pacifist.

Jimmy wants to go back and get those gun-safe guns. “We have to DEFEND ourselves!”

Sophie’s all “We don’t have WATER, Jimmy!” She doesn’t say “DUH” out loud. But look in her eyes. She’s thinking it.

Sophie’s faith is going to be tested, and she’s OK with a bow and arrow, just not guns. Not right away.

“I have a hard time praying prayers that don’t come to be.”

Join the club.

“Trust in GOD!”

“They’re just WORDS,” Jimmy shouts, all testostonery thanks to his firearm. “You can’t eat them! You can’t load them in a gun and SHOOT somebody with them!”

That’s right, Jimmy.

The situations are so arch and artificial as to make commenting on the acting (not empathetic) pointless.

Suffice it to say that faith-based filmmaker Paul Munger (“Princess Cut” and “Unbridled”) is a bit out of his comfort zone with “The Reliant.” You can’t blame him for wanting to cash in on that whole Christian “white nationalism” survivalism thing that’s sweeping his corner of the film audience these days.

Actually you can. All the stories he could have set out to tell, any one of which would have landed his three “names” for his cast (Sorbo, Roberts and Bosworth will take any gig these days), and he tries his hand at something that was going to be hateful, violent and toxic, even had it worked.

He’s put his name on a hateful piece of garbage only designed to engender one reaction — make your heart hurt.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence, and thematic material involving guns

Cast: Kevin Sorbo, Mollee Gray, Blake Burt, Brian Bosworth, Josh Murray, Julie Denton and Eric Roberts.

Credits: script by J.P. Johnston. A Studio City release.

Running time:

In the Dark Ages, every day must have been a horror movie, every breath a taste of the Apocalypse.

Looking back, the only ways to survive the pestilence, lawlessness, hardship and privation had to be myopia — only thinking about that next meal — and faith, with a narrow perspective all its own.

Polish filmmaker Bartosz Konopka keeps his camera tight on the people, primitive settings, rituals and strife of “Sword of God,” shown in Poland as “Krew Boga (The Mute).” This is a world of primal struggle, fur, unworked wood, blood and mud. And Konopka baptizes the viewer in it and delivers something wholly credible and holy horrific, a grim tale of survival and “civilization” from an era when the two weren’t necessarily compatible.

It’s“Black Robe” set on the Baltic Sea, where we’re tumbled into a small boat with only two survivors staggering ashore on a remote island.

The warrior priest (Krzysztof Pieczynski) has his sword, his crucifix and his mission. Convert the locals before his king arrives, so that he has “a Christian prince” capable of “human speech” (Polish) to parlay with.

Without that, summary slaughter is his brand of diplomacy.

The other man (Karol Bernacki) has a crucifix as well. But he’s more dubious about the mission, especially after they’re confronted with the locals — chalk-faced pagans in fur, with queer rituals and rites, bows, arrows and clubs for weapons and speech that is but gibberish to the visiting Poles.

The gibberish sounds Germanic, a sly Polish joke slipped in about their historic tormentors.

“Blessed are those who believe without understanding,” the priest intones (in Polish, with English subtitles). We experience these “savages” the way those two men do. Their words are not translated, their motives questionable.

Perhaps the fact that the first shot they take at the priest is caught in his wooden cross, and not just chest, impresses them. There has to be a reason they don’t dispatch these two the same way they did in the priests who came before.

“Apparently, your god did not bless them,” the pagan chief (Jacek Koman), who speaks Polish, cracks. He was shipwrecked here and knows the world that produced this sword-wielding man of the cloth. The priest’s threats of “doom” (the king) on its way don’t sway him.

“My people will tire of you.”

The priest is insistent, short-tempered and hell-bent on getting a church built and converts in it before his master, the king, arrives. The priest’s companion has more compassion and understanding, even after he is seized and his mouth is sewn shut.

The script allows for confrontations and debates, conversions, bonfires and heretic burnings. But much of the dialogue is interior monologue, prayers of confession and questioning.

“Should I not hate those who hate you, oh Lord?”

“Sword of God” is a minimalist tale, without a lot of story and only a few shocking instances of violence that don’t require translation or deciphering. This is “First Contact” as it played out in many primitive places over the course of many centuries.

The pagans aren’t explained any more than their speech is translated. The priest has only his faith, his instincts and his sword to rely upon.

The locals might grouse and menace, but history tells us the men with steel blades always had the advantage, with or without a crucifix.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, graphic violence

Hi: Krzysztof Pieczynski, Karol Bernacki, Wiktoria Gorodecka and Jacek Koman.

Credits: Directed by Bartosz Konopka , script by Bartosz Konopka, Przemyslaw Nowakowski and Anna Wydra A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:43

All you need to make science fiction cinema is some conventional gadget, dressed up and re-purposed as your “device,” a good gimmick for what that device delivers and some villains who crave that device for nefarious purposes.

No. You don’t need to remake “Dune.” Again.

“Soundwave” deserves points for being sci-fi on a budget, at least in that regard joining such indie sci-fi fare as “Primer,” the more famous “Safety Not Guaranteed” and “Cypher.”

The gimmick here is “He’s invented a way to listen to the past,” so there’s something of that Dennis Quaid film,  “Frequency,” in it. And the gadget is some sort of repackaged oscilloscope, with a showy pair of headphones (No, Dr. Dre, there’s no listening to the past via “Beats”).

But the movie is kind of a shrug, really. There’s little pace, allowing the peril our hero faces to evaporate. The low-tech solution to showing how our young inventor/hero “hears” past conversations, blurry freeze-frames, sometimes taking up more screen time than the eye has the patience to sit through, is novel the first time we see it, annoying ever after.

And the the bloodless turn by the lead actor, Hunter Doohan (TV’s “Truth be Told” and “Your Honor”) lowers the stakes every minute he’s on the screen. I hate to pick on performers, but there was enough tension, action and “love interest” heart in this script for us to expect something to come of it all.

Nothing much does.

Ben is a tech whiz working for a failing radio repair shop, a kid picking up cash on the side whenever he’s summoned to a crime scene. His gadget can tell him, and through him the police, whodunit. Det. Macy (Vincent Nappo) is impressed, figures they should go into business together.

Actually, he knows a guy. But “John” (Paul Tassone) is so instantly villainous he should be twirling a mustache. The “game changer” might have John, or Frank or whatever name he’s going under, impressed. But he’s quick with the threats, the digs at Ben’s late father.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you have something you don’t want anyone to hear,” is how Ben sizes up the heavy.

He’s constantly testing, always listening in — to break-ups and meal-orders, arguments and flirtations. He needs a little data about the time and geography of the chat, but he’s tinkering with the gadget, and not just using it to solve crimes.

He overhears a 911 call that sends him in pursuit of a pretty convenience store cashier (Katie Owlsey, who did writer-director Dylan K. Narang’s earlier film, “All I Need”). Covering for how he keeps her from getting too close to the edge of that roof is the best lying he’s ever had to do.

Ben is on the lam from the bad guys, and people he’s close to are getting killed. Naturally, he crashes at the suicidal woman’s place.

The “device” as plot device would work better if Narang had come up with more interesting things for Ben to overhear. The idea of trying to “hear” and learn about dead parents, which Ben presents as his impetus and which Katie yearns to try out?

Played.

The picture would have managed more suspense, just by putting this story on its feet and on the run. There’s a chase at the opening of the film, but the rest of it lacks urgency.

The film has atmosphere, gloom and a little tech-menace about it. But Doohan gives us little sense of fearing for his fate, and Owsley doesn’t raise the stakes, either.

The whole affair just fades, like a soundwave (contrary to the film’s “science”), growing fainter until that point where it decays altogether.

So congrats for making this on a shoestring, but even movies that cost nothing have to be about something, or about more than this.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, blood

Cast: Hunter Doohan, Katie Owsley, Paul Tassone, Mike Beaver, Vince Nappo

Credits: Written and directed by Dylan K. Narang. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:36

No big screens to release to — not even a drive in?

Oh. Right. This is the Pete Davidson autobiography. Nobody was going to see it in cinemas anyway. Amazon Prime, like Pete’s other movie, was its probable fate.

“The King of Staten Island” also stars Marisa Tomei and Steve Buscemi and the fellow who goes by “Machine Gun Kelly.”

There’s even a part for Maude Apatow, the Clint Howard of the Apatow empire.

Here’s a link to my review.

“Thi Mai (Rumbo a Vietnam)” is another bubble-gum colored Spanish travelogue comedy, this one set mostly in Vietnam.

It sets us up for “heartwarming,” for culture clash/language barrier gags, for madcap misadventures and a little romance — some straight, some gay.

Almodóvar changed Spain, or at least Spanish rom-coms. Every Netflix comedy is gay-friendly proof.

Virtually nothing promised by this one comes off, making for an irritating movie stuffed with trite scenes and insurmountable obstacles, all of which are neatly surmounted by the finale.

It’s damned irritating is what it is.

It begins with a bad day — Elvira (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), a banker of  a certain age, is “pre-retired” by her ageist boss.

She’s just gathering her girls, harried, unworldly housewife Rosa (Adriana Ozores) and testy hardware store co-owner Carmen (Carmen Machi) for a “Tonight, we drink” vent-fest, when tragic news is added to the menu.

Carmen’s daughter dies in a car wreck. Months later, her friends cannot pull her out of her funk, she and her husband can’t bear to even reopen the store. And then Pilar calls. That adoption of a Vietnamese orphan that daughter Maria was setting up?

“She’s approved!”

Carmen’s impulse is to race to Vietnam and claim this little piece of her daughter as her own. No, that is NOT how it works. And yes, the idea is not unlike getting a new puppy after your dog dies.

A repellent comparison, which anybody watching this cannot help but make.

There’s nothing for it but for Elvira to join her in this quixotic quest, and for Rosa to escape her needy/control-freak husband and their tuned-out teens to do the same.

Upon arrival, they meet Andres (Dani Rovira), a gay man ready to start his life in Vietnam with his in-country lover Jose. Andres speaks enough Vietnamese to get the ladies out of their first jam. He’s helpful.

Then they meet Dan (Eric Nguyen), guide and adoption agency intermediary. Dan becomes Obstacle One against acquiring Thi Mai,” the little girl Maria was to adopt.

Because…paperwork, legalities, no standing and “I’m very sorry.”

The film descends into a series of miscommunications, “sneak arounds” to try and get to someone over Dan’s head, to pass on a doll to the child, to make this very difficult thing happen in an instant because that’s what Carmen wants more than anything else in the world.

The ladies wind up in the casino, in assorted wrong places (a rice paddy), and the language barrier scenes, at least, are handled with a deft touch. Don’t translate what the Vietnamese are saying, have the ladies (speaking Spanish, or Spanglish) struggle to mime out their meaning as whatever Vietnamese person they’re dealing with tries to understand and chatter back.

“How do you say, ‘Are you sure this is chicken?'”

Rosa is worried sick they’re going to feed her cooked dog.

One other scene that comes off is Andres’ botched reunion with Jose, a comical debacle parked in the middle of Halong Bay, with its towering, forested islands as a backdrop.

The rest? Merely irritating nonsense. The ladies aren’t funny enough to wring laughs out of the script, and the gay jokes are both out-of-date and too few in number to compensate.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexuality, smoking, drinking

Cast:Carmen Machi, Adriana Ozores, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Dani Rovira and Eric Nguyen

Credits: Directed by Patricia Ferreira, script by Marta Sánchez.  A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:39

Never got the fanaticism surrounding this title. But I wasn’t nine when it came out.

Can’t knock that cast, though. Perhaps only Superfan Josh Gad could get Sean, Martha, Corey, Josh et al together again.

That, and the enforced inactivity of a viral outbreak. This should be fun.

https://people.com/movies/josh-gad-to-host-the-goonies-reunion-with-original-cast-members-for-a-special/

A bomb when it opened, reviewed as if Robert Altman was trying to sabotage his then-lauded reputation and end his major studio pictures career, a misfire that halted Robin Williams’ ascent, “Popeye” (1980) lives on as a monument to ’70s cinematic excess, a harbinger of ’80s cinematic excesses to come.

It’s a fascinating bauble in epic form, “Altmanesque” in the sense of messy, chattering lives doing that chattering in a place that never existed — but which lives on, as a tourist attraction on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean.

Yes, Wolf Krueger’s massive, clapboard abd makeshift-looking, sea-stained “Sweethaven” set — Anchor Bay — still stands. It alone is reason enough to reconsider the picture, which has shared traits with other under performing Big Budget epics such as “Catch-22,” “Chaplin” and Spielberg’s “1941.”

There’s wrongheadedness in the whole enterprise. But they literally “don’t make’em like that any more.”

Harry Nilsson’s sweet, forlorn and nostalgic songs compliment but don’t save Jules Feiffer’s aimless, meandering screenplay.

Altman’s normal saving graces, an ensemble riffing and improvising and talking over one another, has a hard time filling that enormous, eye-popping set. Having a couple of members of his rep company (Shelley Duvall, Paul Dooley) on board wasn’t enough.

Sticking the gifted mime, tumbler and clown Bill Irwin in as many shots as he could doesn’t make enough of a difference.

And yet here we are, 40 years later, remembering a movie that stops film buffs — to this day — when we stumble across it channel surfing.

Williams practically needs subtitles for us to catch all his (sometimes improvised) asides and one-liners.

“Don’t touch nothin‘. You might get a venerable disease.”

The running gags never quite wear out their welcome, Father Oyl (Olive’s Dad) muttering “You owe me an apology” to everyone over every utterance or slight.

The “Tax-Man” (Donald Moffatt, who rose to fame with “The Right Stuff) interrupting every action or transaction with a bill — “Four dollars twenty-five cents, movin’ out tax… Not up to no good, are you? Because if you are, there’s a 50 cent ‘up to no good’ tax.”

Oh, to see screenwriter Feiffer’s tax returns while he was inventing that guy for the screenplay.

Here’s what killed the picture — the ending. Ray Walston’s scene-chewing (with virtually no decent lines) “Poopdeck Pappy,” Popeye’s Dad, arrives in the third act and ensures the movie leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. It’s not all on Walston (“Damn Yankees,” “My Favorite Martian”). Feiffer couldn’t write his way out of this one.

But “Popeye” is perfectly watchable, often downright entertaining, up to that finale. It’s visually rich enough to reward the alert viewer with all these Altmanesque Easter Eggs among the bit players and extras, most of whom only pop off the screen after repeated viewings.

There’s Beatles’ fan, musician and artist Klaus Voorman, conducting an ensemble. Famed rock percussionist Ray Cooper, bald even then, shows up, and there’s Van Dyke Parks at the piano.

And boy howdy, look what “Andy Griffith Show” regular is over there, picking on the old ban-jo — Doug Dillard.

Two future Oscar winners are in that cast — Williams, and in a distinctive bit part (mother to a man-mountain boxer Popeye fights), Linda Hunt.

The one new face and voice that grabbed my attention this last viewing was Dennis Franz, playing a mouthy thug about to get his butt-kicked by Popeye. “Hill Street Blues” and “NYPD Blue” were in the future.

Franz, Dillard, Hunt and character actor Richard Libertini, the whole lot were flown to Malta and kept there until this picture wrapped, an exercise in excess few would dare hazard today.

Maybe with good cause. It has its charms. And I’ll still take this comic book movie over more than a few of the digital animation-assisted ones that Marvel’s churned out over the past decade.

Altman would live long enough for a glorious comeback, Williams and Hunt would win their Oscars, producer Robert Evans would go on to brag about making classics and epic messes like this in “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” and Sweethaven would live on — as an earworm, a status a couple of songs in the film achieved, and as a better-painted-set-turned-attraction, one that tourists can visit and dine on seafood in, with a side a spinach.

MPAA Rating: PG

Cast: Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall, Paul Dooley, Paul L. Smith, Linda Hunt, Ray Waltson, Donald Moffatt, Dennis Franz, Richard Libertini and Bill Irwin.

Credits: Directed by Robert Altman, script by Jules Feiffer, based on the E.C. Seegar comic. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:54

The teenage girl wants the rodeo clown to give away his secrets, how he does his job distracting the bull when the bullrider’s been thrown or in trouble.

“How do you know when the rider’s about to fall off?”

“When his head hits the ground.”

“Bull” is the compelling, understated and surprising story of how these two got to that conversation. Writer-director Annie Silverstein’s debut immerses us in a little-filmed world of working class poverty where one life is hitting a dead end and another going off the rails just as it leaves the station.

Screen newcomer Amber Havard is Kristal, “Kris,” a 15 year-old whose life seems laid out before her, no salvation in sight. She lies like she breathes, poker-faced every time she does. She’s a walking, rarely-talking stereotype — poor white trash, living off her temper and her irresponsible impulses, the last kid on Earth you’d want looking after an adoring little sister, or a pit bull.

It’s the dog that’s run her afoul of Abe, the 50ish black man living down the street. The dog has a habit of breaking into his chicken coop and killing chickens. Abe, given a stoic resignation by Rob Morgan (“Stranger Things,””Daredevil”), lets himself get mad at one thing. He knows these chickens by name.

Kris is more than her diabetic grandmother can handle, and we are not surprised that A) Momma (Sara Allbright) is in prison and B) Kris is taking after her, fighting at school, paying no heed to a future that ends lives like hers almost before they’ve begun.

Kris’s impulse is to get even with the guy who chewed her out over his chickens. She sees he’s out of town on weekends. Messing around his house, her minor vandalism turns into “Let’s impress my ‘friends'” by breaking in and hosting a trash-the-house, drink-his-booze, steal-his-drugs party.

She’s Miss “Can’t you just take me to juvie?” to the cops. But grandma’s pleas have Abe letting her work off some sort of restitution.

Silverstein’s film avoids the timeworn traps of this sort of movie. There’s no epiphany that comes from caring for the stranger’s chickens. But as he makes her help him in his sideline, teaching boys to bull ride, this becomes her new impulse. And with the way she is, we know it won’t be her last.

Abe’s drugs were pain medicine, and he needs it for that weekend job — dressing as a clown (“I ain’t no clown.”) and working in the ring, keeping riders safe at the rodeo. He used to ride himself, and has the scars and aches to prove it.

He works in that world, where seeing a black face is still rare. But he’s a part of another one, where guys like him and old pal Mike (Troy Anthony Hogan) teach black teenagers the skills needed for the black rodeo, a veritable “chitlin’ circuit” alternative to the pro rodeo circuit that makes it on TV.

Silverstein’s film shows us a culture clash where there is no “clash.” Eyebrows might be raised as this white girl hanging around black men and Texas (Angleton, Houston) African American culture. Abe might seem like a better role model than Kris’s family and peers — kids who have no prospects, no ambition and little sign of being cared for. But they’ve got phones and tattoos because impulsive parents enable impulsive teens.

But these are not screen lives with sweeping character arcs. Abe is at the end of the line in his career, something an old flame (Yolanda Ross) reminds him of, but can’t make him agree to. Kris barely interrupts her run of bad choices as new choices start to present themselves.

She remains her Mamma’s child, even if realizing that is the first step towards escaping her fate.

“Bull’s” calling card is its sense of capturing lives as they’re being lived, immersing us in this world, dreading that next ride, that next blunder, fearing for our leads and those close to them.

It’s everything a screen drama and indie film should be — a novel story, characters we rarely see and care about and immersion in a world we know nothing about.

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug and alcohol use, sex/nudity, profanity, violence

Cast: Rob Morgan, Amber Havard, Yolonda Ross, Sara Allbright

Credits: Directed by Annie Silverstein, script by Annie Silverstein and  Johnny McAllister. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:48

The acting isn’t bad, the Barcelona and environs settings gorgeous and there’s a nice tug of the heartstrings in the finale.

But in all honesty, only one thing works in “In Family I Trust,” a Spanish rom-com based on a Laura Norton novel. It’s a running gag, and it involves a dwarf.

The movie surrounding that? Tepid tapas, I have to say.

Bea grew up in a big house full of love and an absent (seaman) father, sitting on the roof every evening, dreaming of becoming an architect.

Years later, she’s living the dream, about to make a big hotel design presentation. Her live-in workplace romance, Victor (Fernando Guallar) proposes, on impulse, in the shower.

“What the Hell?” Bea (Clara Lago) says, in Spanish with English subtitles, if you like. “SI!”

But damn, she can’t even get to the presentation without being bombed with TV evidence of Victor’s fling with a famous TV reporter the night before. Sure, Bea introduced them at a bar, and maybe there was this little “free pass” agreement between them about that one person on Earth each is allowed to sleep with.

But slapping the dude when you’re pitching rich hoteliers, and flinging the model on the floor, is a way to end everything with a bang. She’s homeward bound, where sister Irene (Alexandra Jiménez) is the town mayor, shoving a new “bio-mass” (tree cutting) energy plant through, sister Débora (Paula Malia) is clinging WAY too tightly to her newborn, and Mom (Pedro Almodóvar favorite Carmen Maura)?

“I have a year to live.”

That news is not-quite-shoved-to-the-side-entirely as Bea reinvents herself as a treehouse architect, and Mr. Bio-Mass (Álex García) becomes her first client. He drives a vintage pink Mercedes, which is worth commenting on.

“Only a guy who’s irresistible (and knows it) would drive a car like that.”

Obstacles to love are many, none of them the least bit interesting, none that cannot be solved by Mom’s new solution to everything.

“Have a shot,” she says, tipping over the bottle. “Soon you’ve be over him.”

But — spoiler alert — here’s the only bit that works. It’s not about the biomass controversy, not about Bea’s romantic tug of war, not gay brother Leon’s love affair with a cop, not about Mom’s drinking and dying.

SOMEbody’s baby is starting to look a lot like the “entertainment” at a year-ago bachelorette party.

Ahem.

Sorry, but every damn time this running gag returns, with its “Oh, he’ll be fine, just accept him. It’s nobody’s fault” reassurances (Um, it IS somebody’s fault. Cough, cough.) it is hilarious.

Funny idea, well-executed in that “Death at a Funeral” way, amusingly played.

The rest? “Trust” this “familia” not to deliver the laughs.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexuality, profanity, drinking

Cast: Clara Lago, Álex García, Alexandra Jiménez, Paula Malia, Fernando Guallar , Carlos Cuevas and Carmen Maura

Credits:  Directed by Patricia Font, script by Darío Madrona, Carlos Montero, based on the novel by Laura Norton.  A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:37

Here’s a “Last Picture Show” era story of growing up in the rural West, the crippling burdens of small town life and that one new friend who can help you lift your downcast eyes “To the Stars.”

Sounds sensitive, maybe a little dated, with a hint of Big Subject to be addressed in it? On the nose. Which is a failing of this still-touching feature from the director of “Land Ho!”

The “first impressions can be deceiving” theme is laid out in the first scene. Shy teen Iris Deerborne (Kara Hayward of “Manchester by the Sea”) gets fussed over by her Mom (Jordana Spiro) and Mom’s friend, fretting over a prom dress they’ve been working on.

Gruff farmer Dad (Shea Whigham) cuts them off and sends her on her way to school.

Grumpy Dad, it quickly turns out, is the reasonable one, just trying to “give her a break.” Mom is a big reason Iris is scared of her own shadow.

The harassment she’s subjected to by pick-em-truck classmates walking to school confirms the crippling pigeon-hole Iris has been shoved into. The boys taunt her with “Stinky Drawers,” and are on the cusp of crossing over to assault when, behold, an avenging angel rides to her rescue.

Hurled rocks and expletives are how we, Iris and the punks meet Maggie (Liana Liberato, “The Best of Me,””If I Stay”). She’s a city girl, she explains.

“I’ve got a mouth like a gutter,” she apologizes. Iris practically sprints away from her.

If these two are going to be friends, Maggie, who lives close by, is going to have to be persistent. Showing up at the pond where Iris takes midnight swims, for instance. Iris is slow to let down her guard.

The mean girls clique at school, led by Clarissa (Madisen Beatty) are all set to take City Girl into their ranks, if only she’d learn Iris is an “Untouchable.” Clarissa is an unfiltered bitch, hitting Iris right where it hurts — her ugly nickname, her booze-crippled home life.

Iris can’t bear to look the handsome hired hand (Lucas Jade Zumann) in the eye, out of fear, fear that her lush of a mother reinforces at every turn. Iris has a secret shame. Mom picks at it, and puts down the attentions from the new girl and her new mother in town.

“She gets her clothes from DEE-orr!” She’s going to tire of Iris and toss her aside. Mom expects, NEEDS this to happen.

And Maggie may talk a big game about her “Life Magazine photographer” Dad (Tony Hale) and model-gorgeous Mom (Malin Akerman) and how “they wanted me to be a model.” But for all their efforts to say grace before dinner, to fit in, Mom’s quick agreement to join the ladies at Hazel’s (Adelaide Clemens) in-home beauty shop at church, something dark is hinted at there as well.

“I left my JOB for you,” Dad hisses at every unaccounted for minute in Maggie’s day. Maggie has a secret shame, too.

We see the two of them bludgeoned by misunderstanding parents and cruel classmates, all of them hellbent on smothering this relationship in the crib. But Iris needs an outsider’s take on her situation to start to understand it.

Maggie just needs a friend who’ll stick by her, even after they fight.

Shannon Bradley-Colleary’s screenplay feels quaint, as if it’s broaching the subject of same-sex attraction in the era it is set — 1960 Oklahoma. But the extreme reactions to this sort of unspoken “deviance” make the shock of how quickly attitudes changed, half a century after “Magnificent Seven” was showing at the local cinema, feel fresh.

Too many scenes feel over-familiar, although the cliched “beauty makeover” by the new friend is punctuated by a surprise twist.

Dated touches aside, the two leads are so immersed in their roles that they make us buy in, too. Liberato is the more experienced, and she makes the emerging “assertive woman ahead of her time” stereotype ring true, and Hayward’s depiction of Iris’s crippling shyness and resignation to her fate touching.

The supporting players build on that reality, with Spiro devouring the tipsy, narcissistic villainy of Francine and Whigham beautifully conveying the stern but kind father and husband trying to counter her cruelty, even though nothing in his upbringing or the expectations of what it means to be a man at the time have prepared him to do that.

And as well-worn as depictions of America’s rural-urban divide are, Martha Stephens’ film is a timely reminder that social change and progress comes from cities. It’s the violent resistance to that change that emerges from the “heartland.”

“To the Stars” may be a mixed bag of over-familiar obstacles and dated themes. But this period-perfect piece and a solid cast take us back to an uglier time, just as we were about to forget it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, teen drinking, profanity

Cast: Kara Hayward, Liana Liberato, Jordana Spiro, Malin Akerman, Tony Hale,  Adelaide Clemens and Shea Whigham

Credits: Directed by Martha Stephens, script by Shannon Bradley-Colleary. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:49