Country Gold

Authenticity has a time and a place, but even without it, Reece creates a wonderful cinematic experience.

It’s the tortured artist trope, handled in unexpected ways.

Reece’s ideas don’t always fit together neatly, but by gosh he has a lot of them. It’s a treat to watch him play.

It doesn’t all make sense or add up to much, but there’s a consistency to its inconsistency that I admire. It’s something that works on a mood more than literally. Kind of like a great country song.

For all its formal playfulness, the film never loses its grip on the interior lives to its characters.

This movie gets better the more it strays from its real-life models and into hazy hallucinatory American weirdness. But the snotty dismissiveness with which it treats country music ultimately overwhelms its intriguing qualities.

Despite the f-bombs, the egomania and a montage of Troyal shooting a beer commercial and having a hissy fit as he does, too little here rises to the level of “satire” or even “amusing.”