Profane, hilarious and ultimately heartbreaking, Alex Holdridge's black-and-white feature "In Search of a Midnight Kiss" has a gutter purity that makes you root for it all the way and forgive its patches of ultra-indie awkwardness. Its plot is one that Judd Apatow could use, and probably will: A lovelorn video store geek, not lacking in a certain dissolute charm, tries to find a last-minute New Year's Eve date via Craigslist and winds up circling the drain of existence -- or roaming downtown Los Angeles, which is roughly the same thing -- with a pill-popping, chain-smoking blonde whose hysterical redneck boyfriend keeps calling every five minutes.
A hit at last year's Tribeca Film Festival that has been making the film festival rounds ever since, "In Search of a Midnight Kiss" is both more delicate and more ruthless than that premise suggests. It isn't a farce about dating in the Internet age, because that's nothing more than a plot device, and it's more than a hipster-flavored rom-com, because Holdridge never lets you forget that the distance between these two characters can't be bridged in one night. Wilson (Scoot McNairy) is an aspiring screenwriter with scraggly, on-again-off-again facial hair and an espresso-depresso wardrobe; Vivian (Sara Simmonds) is showing her Texas trailer-park roots, and wearing Lindsay Lohan drag that falls just short of Hollywood Boulevard hooker gear.