EMILE HIRSCH AND PAUL RUDD IN PRINCE AVALANCHE

Two men in the middle of nowhere, painting lines

Prince Avalanche, an offbeat buddy picture by David Gordon Green, is somewhat inconclusive and unfinished-feeling, but it's still a very welcome return to his oddball southern indie roots for this director. Working alone together on a summer job in a lonely place, Lance (Emile Hirsch) and Alvin (Paul Rudd), who have a connection -- Alvin is the boyfriend of Lance's sister -- admit eventually that their pretensions, Alvin's self-sufficiency, Lance's skill with women, are self-deluded, and in admitting this, they bond. Alvin, and Lance, who he has "hired," are a couple of not-so-young guys painting lines and placing markers on a road in an isolated zone of Texas devastated by a great forest fire a year or two earlier. The movie doesn't tell much about the place, or about the two men. The point is, they're on their own; they're faced by who they are, if they even know. This is a chance for Green to get back to basics too. In his hilarious but gross Apatow-sponsored comedies featuring James Franco he had strayed a long way from those indie roots. It's good to see him back, but after all the places he's been, you wonder: does he even know who he is?

Alvin and Lance share a tent, decamping every few days as they continue their work along the road. They can go to town on the weekend, though only one chooses to. And this is where they split, only to come together again. Alvin stays out there, wanting some "solo time." Lance wants to party with girls he knows and get laid, so he takes their little tractor-thing and heads off. (His weekend is not shown but recounted by him in a long monologue.) Neither effort at an independent weekend is a great success, and when the two men are back together there's some truth-telling, some fighting, and the inevitable bonding, aided by two bottles of white lightening left them by an oddball local trucker (Lance LeGault) -- the drunk time shown in a montage, with singing, and trashing of equipment.

Green makes use of a few strange local people to add spice. While Lance is away Alvin comes across a spaced-out old lady (Joyce Payne) picking through the ruins of a burned-out house. "Sometimes I think I'm stirring up the ashes of my life," she says: it's a little bit too true to be a good metaphor. But is this really her house, or is she just a wandering crazy person? What is her relation to the peculiar trucker, who denies her existence?

Hirsch and Rudd have every opportunity to play with their characters, and the scenes and dialogue are good from minute to minute, even if they may feel too much at times like improv class. Rudd is usually romantic and sexy as a film comic, but this time he has glasses and a mustache and a paunch and ramps up the nerdiness. Hirsch, who played a bold and youthful explorer of nature in Sean Penn's moving true story film from the Jon Krakauer book, Into the Wild (2007), when he was twenty-two, is preening and pouty here, but also makes no effort at glamor: he speaks of being "old and fat." The camera takes long looks at them, and they look back, doing "slow burns" (this works especially well for Hirsch). But while character, however amorphous, is important, the action isn't. The music and the landscape matter just as much. The value of Prince Avalance is, rather, the raw strangeness of its setting and of the whole film. It stays out of any specific mold and you feel that anything can happen. Along with "bromance," there are hints of horror, danger, the supernatural, and the setup is not without its hints of Beckettian austerity and desperation. The music seems loud and intrusive at first when it invades the opening montage of bare trees and skies, but by the end seems like a welcome warm bath. Green regular cinematographer Tim Orr contributes vivid, sometimes unexpected images.

Prince Avalanche, 94 mins. is based on the Icelandic film Either Way (Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson) but was entirely written and directed by David Gordon Green, apparently adding comedy in writing and directing not in the original. Debuted at Sundance, also shown at the Berlinale, San Francisco, and other festivals. Limited US release 9 August 2013; UK, 18 October 2013.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.