The presence of John Hawkes had my curiosity.
The presence of Octavia Spencer, Clifton Collins, Jr., and Robert Forster got my attention.
And yes, Small Town Crime is every bit the ensemble film you’d hope for with a cast list like that. Filmmaking brothers Eshom and Ian Nelms have cut their teeth on a few small features (Lost On Purpose, Waffle Street), but take a giant leap into the world of wider audiences with this equal parts hard-hitting and charming hard-boiled detective story.
Hawkes plays Mike Kendall, a former police detective drowning in his own alcoholism and a biting self-awareness who finds a renewed purpose after finding a victimized girl on the side of the road and seeking to uncover the identity of her attackers. Somewhat of a private gumshoe origin story, Kendall may be a drunk, but he’s also a smart and fearless individual who doesn’t seem to have an off switch. And his life in the gutters has opened him up to a world of unique contacts and connections that put him in a unique place to finds answers where his former colleagues on the force come up empty handed. Kendall is a great representative of the tone of the film itself: riding that razor’s edge of knowing humor and gritty violence with a splash of unpredictability.
Small Town Crime is first and foremost an engaging who-done-it mystery that successfully swings between moments of character based humor (such as Clifton Collins Jr’s “Mood”, a pimp who’s a lot smarter than his swagger suggests) and character based violence (such as the hitmen who menace Kendall with an Anton Chigur-esque threat). The range in tone never feels jarring, but always right for the characters, and Small Town Crime endears us to its characters so effectively one is immediately desirous of a series of ongoing adventures set in this mountainous, midwestern world of noir.
While Hawkes absolutely owns the film in a fearless performance that is as self-loathing as it is self-confident (not to mention that he races around town in the coolest classic Chevy you’ll ever see on screen) one might think there wouldn’t be room for the others. But Forster almost steals the show as the victim’s grandfather who is willing to fund Kendall’s private investigation and himself seems to have seen some action in his past. Then there’s Octavia Spencer and Anthony Anderson, who play Kendall’s sister and brother-in-law. That’s right, this is a movie where John Hawkes and Octavia Spencer are brother and sister (and Spencer an exec producer). You definitely want to see this movie.
Small Town Crime and filmmakers Eshom and Ian Nelms will be compared to the Coen Brothers both because they’re a writing/filmmaking brother duo and because the tone of their film is reminiscent of some of the Coens’ crime outings. It’s probably an unfair comparison that will either set them up for comparison with the Coens or imply that their film is derivative of those works. No one compares to the Coens, so let’s just leave that aside. But the Nelms’ film may share a tonal kinship with, say, Blood Simple, it is also its own unique story that wants to entertain and introduce you to characters that you’ll want to revisit and cruise with for many sequels to come.
And I’m Out.