Surveying the Mumblecore-manic media coverage of the last week or so, three features are in danger of slipping through the cracks. Totally coincidentally, these are the three films of the fest that I’m currently most interested in. At the risk of sounding like a Swanbergian heroine, my crushes on individual films and filmmakers come and go in manic waves, and right now, I’m crushing heavily on Team Picture (directed by Kentucker Audley, who appears to be the same person as the film’s star, Andrew Nehringer), and Frank V. Ross’ Hohokam and Quietly on By. These are the least-known films on the schedule for sure, although all three have made appearances at Harvard Film Archive’s Independents Week. Seen as a unit, the three films point in an exciting new direction: towards the suburbs.

As has been widely noted, films like Hannah Takes the Stairs, Quiet City and Mutual Appreciation are, unabashedly, about white, largely post-collegiate urban youth. In LOL, Kissing on the Mouth and Quiet City, no one seems to really have to work; elsewhere occupations are ancillary to relationships and artistic pursuits. In Hannah Takes the Stairs, Hannah is an intern and her roommate, Rocco, is unemployed. They can’t afford air conditioning, but someone (Daddy?) is paying for the city apartment and the beer. Class is a deliberate non-issue in a lot of these films, for the same reason that it’s deliberately not mentioned in most of Woody Allen’s movies that aren’t murder mysteries: when your characters don’t have to struggle to satisfy basic needs, they have a lot of time leftover to screw and be screwed.

And most of that screwing takes place in cities. Hannah and her first boyfriend recline on a beach under towering Chicago skyscrapers; Hannah and her third boyfriend discuss their “chronic dissatisfaction” to the sounds of buses and sirens and neighbors outside the window. Bujalski’s films take place in hipster villages reminiscent of Slacker Austin; the Brooklyn Alan wanders in Mutual Appreciation is virtually the same territory traversed on the G train in Quiet City. Both Brooklyns are occupied by artists, musicians, and the carefully-coiffed knockouts who love them.

Meanwhile, Audley and Ross are making movies about anxieties experienced far away from skyscrapers and internships. Their characters are, for the most part, on the low end of middle class, and are uniformly undereducated. They work at restaurants or in low-level managerial positions, sometimes procured by parents; maybe they’ve served in the military. They live in shabby apartment complexes, or rented houses with overgrown yards, or in their childhood homes. Most of them aren’t artists, and those who are have little outlet for their creativity beyond the local strip mall coffee shop. Their lives are neatly boxed within suburban spaces, and there seems to be a shared anxiety about the world outside.

Ross, in particular, seems to be concerned with drawing characters whose internal issues are proscribed by external limitations. Quietly on By and Hohokam, with their love-hate depictions of freeways and parking lots and cubicles, are as much about the relationship between urban architecture and psychic constriction as any Antonioni film. Team Picture could be described as a movie about a guy breaking up with his home town. The film takes a brief sojourn into Chicago, but Audley’s liquor stores, motels and highways seem to exist in a different universe from Joe Swanberg’s sun-dreched flats. The rest of the action takes place in suburban Memphis, which is depicted as a series of strip malls and bungalows hidden within leafy, almost tropical back yards. Team Picture is possibly the lowest-budgeted film on the New Talkies schedule, but at times Audley’s long shots approach the painterly beauty of pastoral landscapes.

Audely and Ross are at least as interested as their peers in the social dynamics of leisure, but in Hohokam and Team Picture, work life is as carefully drawn as recreation. On some not entirely subtextual level, Hohokam is about the schizophrenic drama that most of us play out every day, between who we are at work and who we are at home. On these grounds it has quite a bit in common with Team Picture, which is about one very young man’s attempt to reconcile that schizophrenia. (Quietly On By’s protagonist is unemployed—which only gives him more hours of the day to devote to general self-loathing–but that film is more concerned with the double-life engendered by living at home as a young adult. On that measure, it has some vague similarities to Dance Party USA, which could be fodder for more discussion at a later date.)

Team Picture’s star looks so different from the first scene (which takes place at his office job) to the second (set on a boozy summer afternoon in the front yard) that at first I wondered if he was actually playing two characters. It’s the polo-shirted desk jockey who grimly, silently nods when his boss/stepfather questions his plans for the future. It’s the shirtless, straw-hatted lawn dweller who shows up at an open mic night, to sing a song with the refrain, “I’m gonna quit my job tomorrow, you’ll see,” and who picks up a love interest with the line, “Do you like enjoyment?”

If Mutual Appreciation and Hannah Takes the Stairs are movies about the kinds of people who would watch movies like Mutual Appreciation and Hannah Takes the Stairs, Team Picture, Quietly On By and, particularly, Hohokam, are about the kinds of people who consume the kind of culture that Bujalski and Swanberg’s films feel like a reaction against. When Lori, Hohokam’s protagonist, is feeling down, her boyfriend buys her a suit of plastic armor so they can reenact scenes from Troy. The same boyfriend defines his masculinity through popular culture––or, at the very least, has dreams in which he worries about looking “like a sissy in front of Bruce Willis.” Their appreciation of fast food and junk culture is not at all ironic, and Ross’ depiction of it is not in any way condescending. He photographs a trip to the local taco shack the way Godard used to photograph afternoons at a café.

Ross’ unrelenting eye for socio-economic detail aside, Hohokam is a pretty remarkable portrait of what happens to an unremarkable relationship past the point of no return. Lori and her boyfriend have been together for long enough that a simple fight isn’t going to result in a break up. Real life doesn’t swell to a peak and then fall into a resolution in the temporal space that a film like this can cover. Temperaments change suddenly. Some problems take time, others are quickly solved by a token present, a fuck, a cheeseburger and a beer. Catharsis is sometime more physical than emotional—if Hohokam builds to anything, it’s perhaps the most realistic puking scene ever committed to film.

When Hohokam played Harvard’s Independent’s Week earlier this year, curator Ray Carney’s synopsis essentially positioned the film as Mumblecore all-grown-up. “Although Hohokam recognizably belongs with the other films on the program, the characters appear to be five or ten years older and considerably more battle–scarred and world–weary than those in the other works,“ Carney wrote. “Is this the future the characters in the other works have to look forward to?”

Maybe Hohokam can function as testimony to the relationship decay that the budding couples of Quiet City or Hannah Takes the Stairs have to look forward to. But Hannah and Jamie and Marnie and Alan are city dwellers, they’re artists; they have college degrees and, as far as we can tell, attentive, generous parents. It’s hard to imagine any other character set to appear on the IFC Center’s screen this week getting to the point where their own boyfriend describes them as “nigger rich,” the euphemism lobed in Hohokam at a collection agent who is herself living beyond her means.

Funny Ha Ha and Kissing on the Mouth were initially revelatory because of the ways in which they seemed to somehow transmit things that I’d only previously seen in life onto the screen. In their own ways, Hohokam, Quietly on By, and Team Picture do the same. They’re not the filler or the dregs of the series; they’re signs that once the Mumblecore hype falls away, there will always be American, truly independent filmmakers producing work worthy of seeking out and paying attention to.