Nuts!

The movie culminates in a cinematic coup de grâce bold enough to spin your head — one that gives the movie an entirely new dimension.

Once the movie is over and you realize how the filmmaker has turned the tables, you can't help but be amused — and amazed.

Nuts! is a brisk, engrossing, tongue-in-cheek film that unfolds at just the right pace — and it’s a piece of American history that couldn’t feel more relevant to modern times.

One of Penny Lane’s best pictures, Nuts! is quite a brilliant way to tell a peculiar story. Condensing a lot of material into a brief running time, this format allows certain liberties to be taken, particularly when imagined conversations appear.

Director Lane and screenwriter Thom Stylinski take a lighthearted, folksy approach to telling Brinkley’s life story, using fairly unsophisticated animation and twangy vocalizations in the spirit of the man’s carefully created image.

This quick, short Sundance Film Festival award winner leaves out a lot more about Brinkley than in it includes. But save your trip to the library (or Wikipedia) for after the film. The surprises, comic and tragic, are worth waiting for.

Nuts!”is an intriguing, if patronizing, curio from the cabinet of American arcana, a geegaw from the collective attic that, when dusted off, looks grotesquely funny in the light of today. We wonder how anyone could buy it. Just imagine what, one day, they’ll say about us.