A very beautiful film about love, friendship, solidarity, deception, confusion and unfocused lives in the latter days. Highly recommended. First feature by an art director from the mountains of Virginia, who landed in Los Angeles. Original, magical, hard, sad and funny comedy-drama, thanks to the freedom granted by independent cinema.

Josh Locy is the director of the off-beat Hunter Gatherer, which features an uneasy mix of farce and tragedy in a lower middle class African-American community in Los Angeles. The protagonist is Ashley (well played by Andre Royo, best known for his work on The Wire). When we first meet Ashley, he's just done a three year stint in prison and moves back home with his mother who soon tires of his presence.

The tone for most of the film (except for the ending) is decidedly farcical. The Hunter Gatherer of the title is our protagonist who can best be described as a hustler. He's obsessed with a former girlfriend, Linda, with whom he wants to get back together with and then concocts a ludicrous scheme involving the sale of old refrigerators.

When he learns that the county requires $100 to dispose of the refrigerators as "hazardous material", he goes around the neighborhood offering to take the aforementioned junk off people's hands for a reduced price. He then conscripts Jeremy, a young man he meets out on the street, to transport the refrigerators using his truck, to a dump outside the city.

When the truck breaks down, Ashley ends up first burying the refrigerators in his mother's backyard. He then attempts to hook up with Jeremy's aunt, a prostitute who soon dumps him for a manager at a motel. Somehow Ashley finds a way to convince the motel manager to let him stay at the motel, where he uses an adjoining room to stash more refrigerators.

At first all the quirky characters are kind of endearing but the refrigerator plot goes on for much too long. There's also a sub-plot involving Ashley taking continuing education classes to improve his penmanship.

The narrative begins to veer away from the comedy when we learn that Jeremy has been hustling also—earning extra dollars as the subject of a medical clinic's experiments (the nature of those experiments is never explained in detail). Jeremy is also trying to have an old ventilator repaired to try and help his grandfather breathe better—Jeremy in fact lives with his grandfather (of all places) in a nursing home.

As noted above, the narrative is basically a one-note idea that far extends its welcome. There is an attempt to inject pathos to the story when Jeremy saves Ashley from committing suicide by blowing himself up with dynamite—and Ashley in turn is unable to save Jeremy, who ends up drowning in a swimming pool.

Somehow in all this there's a message about the power of friendship but most of it relies on extracting humor from the main character's lack of insight. We get it early on and ultimately the Hunger Gatherer runs out of gas.

There are so many reasons to like the recently debuted and utterly original drama "Hunter Gatherer". At least there are for me. Candidly, I went into this movie with modest expectations at best. I emerged from the experience knocked completely on my can.

Number one, the film's star, Andre Royo. The veteran actor absolutely inhabits his character of Ashley, a total sad sack and selfish dunderhead who isn't fooling anybody with his foolish scams and attempts to be somebody he is not, which is one of life's hopeless losers. Still, despite there not being much to root for with Ashley, Royo's performance is so compelling and charged with naive optimism that we practically can't help but root for him to make something out of his nothing existence, an unforgiving reality created entirely of his own vices and devices.

Secondly, the barely known George Sample III. This young man is a genuine revelation as Ashley's happenstance sidekick, Jeremy (or as he asks to be called with no reservation that it may be considered insulting, "Germs"). Sample brings us a lonely kid who willingly serves as a paid "lab rat", volunteering for mysterious medical science clinical trials which require that he wear a battery of magnets adhered to his chest and abdomen. He willingly does this to scratch out a living in the not so glam locale of L.A. in which he survives. But moreover, his main motivation lies in helping to fund the care, and ultimately the revitalization, of his ailing grandfather, who is slowly wasting away in a convalescent home. Jeremy is exceptionally compassionate, industrious, determined and ambitious. We know without question why we pull so hard for him to make it.

The female cast members are uniformly impressive in "Hunter Gatherer", but I submit that the remarkable work of Kellee Stewart as Nat stands out as perhaps the best among this gifted group. Nat is a woman who strolls the streets for a living, but clearly longs to find a nice guy to love and be cared for by so that she may walk away from turning tricks for good. Stewart is yet another natural talent to appreciate here, and she makes you ache almost as much as Nat does for better things.

Writer/Director Joshua Locy earns high praise as the uncommonly creative mind behind this indy stunner. Locy starts out as if he is going to take us on a largely quirky, kooky kind of cutesy little romp through an offbeat rom-com type of tale. But he isn't. For gradually, and almost without us even recognizing it is happening, his unusual story becomes one of crippling disappointment and desperation. Hardly the stuff of light and breezy fare. And a testament to the extraordinary vision of an artist whose voice deserves to, and SHOULD be, heard from often in the years to come.

Finally special recognition must be invested in the remarkable music which serves as consistent and powerful punctuation to the scenes and events in "Hunter Gatherer". Keegan DeWitt has composed a score that merges perfectly with the gradually changing tone inherent in this narrative. At first frisky and fun, like a cross between Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, the sound eventually becomes, along with the film's feel, more weighty, even grave, reminiscent of the most ominous instrumentation of Pink Floyd. Such diversity and depth is not easy to pull off by any musician. That DeWitt does so, and so expertly, is, again, wholly indicative of a true expert at his craft.

It may be a challenge to extract a theme from "Hunter Gatherer". It is so likely unlike anything else you've ever seen. Upon reflection the day after watching it now, I will bring this observation to the table. Ashley, while consumed with pursuing, with hunting, someone who didn't care about him in the slightest, never paused to realize that all the while there was a person who, while he did almost nothing to deserve it, had come, had gathered the capacity, to care about him. Significantly.

And so, in the end, it is left then for Ashley, and he alone, to try desperately to pick up the pieces of a viciously shattered soul.