Beyond the Multiplex

"Great World of Sound": Swimming with sharks (and Christian musicians) at the lowest rung of the dream economy
Martin (Pat Healy) is a skinny, balding white guy with bad posture and a collection of geeked-out short-sleeve shirts, emanating arrested-adolescent lack of self-esteem. Clarence (Kene Holliday) is a gregarious, bearlike African-American, prone to misstatements and malapropisms but possessed of a finely honed wit and multiple diplomas from the school of hard knocks. Together this odd coupling are the protagonists of "Great World of Sound," a wrenching fable of life at the ass-end of the music business that was one of the few real surprise pictures to emerge at Sundance this year.

Actually, even claiming that Martin and Clarence work in the music business is giving them too much credit. They are hucksters pure and simple, no matter how much they may want to deny it to themselves. Working out of a shabby rented office in Charlotte, N.C., for a sleazoid character named Shank (John Baker) -- who claims he produced a No. 3 hit for a one-time teen idol named Stephanie in 1987 -- Martin and Clarence separate would-be American idols from a few grand at a time, selling them recording sessions at a third-rate Nashville studio and production and promotion deals that go nowhere.

Out of this grim, sub-David Mamet setting, director Craig Zobel and co-writer George Smith have crafted a gripping, bittersweet fable that encompasses both the immense American capacity for self-delusion and the American faith in redemption. Zobel and his cast and crew actually traveled around the South from one chain motel to the next recruiting amateur musicians -- gospel trios, death-metal groups, a girl band in flight-attendant uniforms, would-be Shania Twains and John Mayers by the dozen -- to appear in their film as Clarence and Martin's prey. (No one was tricked into performing on camera under false pretenses; they all knew they were making a movie and that the visiting "record executives" were fictional characters.)

These performances are sometimes artless and awful, sometimes thoroughly charming and frequently heartbreaking. Sitting there in the audience, you want the situation to be real as much as these musicians might; maybe, just maybe, Shank's fly-by-night record company will actually give one of these people a legitimate shot. The thing is, Martin and Clarence want that too. They know they're in Birmingham, Ala., or Knoxville, Tenn., hustling to get paid, but they can convince themselves, just barely, that they're helping these no-hopers (or almost-no-hopers) fulfill a dream.

Clarence and Martin's semi-improvised sales patter ranges from the hilarious to the insane, but "Great World of Sound" reaches its pivot point when this duo, who've become close if improbable friends, can no longer pretend to each other or themselves that they're anything but con artists. When Martin has a crisis of conscience and sends an attractive Joni-esque crooner (who actually has some talent) home before they close the deal, Clarence blisters him with an expletive-laden economics lecture that might be the show-stopping moment in any American film I've seen this year. Holliday is a 58-year-old TV actor with sporadic credits (he co-starred on "Matlock" in the late '80s), but this performance is a revelation. Clarence is sometimes a lovable rogue and sometimes a disquieting scumbag, but Holliday gradually reveals him as a flawed, angry, bitter, tremendously loyal and profoundly human character who lives by his own code in the wilderness of bottom-level capitalism.

Zobel's direction is unaffected but accomplished; what's striking about "Great World of Sound" is that it never looks or feels cheap, despite being directed on a shoestring with a cast of unknowns and an almost unmanageable X factor (the amateur musicians). Rebecca Mader and Tricia Paoluccio are terrific in supporting roles, and the film's depiction of life and work in the corporatized New South is devastating without ever being dogmatic. This is independent filmmaking with genuine ambition and an unfaltering vision, depicting unglamorous lives with sympathy but without much sentiment, and thoroughly devoid of the pallid quirkiness that might make it a crossover candidate. This terrific little picture has limited marketplace potential because it's just too dark, but it should launch Zobel (along with Holliday and Healy) to greater things.

"Great World of Sound" opens Sept. 14 at the Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Plaza in New York; Sept. 28 in Los Angeles; Oct. 5 in Seattle; Oct. 12 in Durham, N.C., Minneapolis, Omaha, Neb., Raleigh, N.C., San Diego and San Francisco; and Oct. 19 in Nashville, Philadelphia and Washington, with more cities to follow.

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