I’ve been in New York for a grand total of about two weeks in the last month and a half, so I missed most of the press screenings for New Directors/New Films, the annual co-production of MoMA and the Film Society at Lincoln Center, which opened last night. We’ll be publishing a recap of the full festival from Brandon Harris tomorrow, but I wanted to drop some notes on the one film for which I did have a chance to attend a press screening, Harmony & Me.

Written and directed by Bob Byington (his RSO: Registered Sex Offender premiered at SXSW last year and then played around the country on the Range Life tour) and edited by Frank V. Ross (Hohokam, Present Company), the film was shot in Austin and features a number of faces that will be familiar to devotees of SXSW cinema and its descendants: Justin Rice as Harmony, a “loser” who we meet mid-heartbreak at the hands of a brunette succubus (Kristen Tucker); Alex Karpovsky as a friend whose verbal abuse of his sweetly nerdy wife is played for uncomfortable laughs — and serves as a reminder to Harmony that relationships are inevitably sad and cruel as often as they’re legitimately romantic; Pat Healy as the dickish boss at Harmony’s cubicle job; Allison Latta as an outlandishly outgoing neighbor who sets her sights, against his wishes, on our retiring hero.

Harmony is the only American film world premiering at New Directors this year, and it’s an unlikely candidate for a festival that otherwise mostly cherry-picks hits from Sundance, Berlin and other major international festivals. It’s shot on video and looks like it; its barebones aesthetic serves not another socially serious work of neo-neo, nor does it really have much in common with The Unofficial Genre that Starts With “M”, other than a shaky camera and a handful of actors. If the latter type of film earned the blessing/curse of being grouped together under a name mockingly invented by a sound engineer and inspired by their common tendency towards imprecise speech, whether improvised our written for a certain kind of naturalism, Harmony definitely doesn’t fit; the last thing this is is a film about people who don’t know how to express themselves. Harmony has even reduced his story of lost love into a spiel, one which he broken-record unloads throughout the film, using the same speech to express his pain to his best friend and to his Chinese herbalist.

The film is low on incidental action — Harmony takes piano lessons, goes to work, goes bowling, goes to his brother’s wedding, accidentally runs into his ex, overdoses on a gift from her that he’s allergic to on purpose ––  but each crumb dropped is essential. Harmony starts out in a bad way and only gets worse; Harmony & Me follows each step of a descent towards rock bottom that resolves in redemption, a retreat into solipsism that allows him to emerge with a song. Yes, it’s another movie where Justin Rice has romantic troubles and plays music, but it’s also a movie about how songs, or any discrete works of art, come to be, the process by which uniquely personal pain can be churned into something that gives other people pleasure. It’s an almost procedural description of the method by which an injury is turned into a gift.

All of which gives no indication of how funny much of the film is. The best way to describe Harmony & Me is as a comedy, one with as many jokes about pedophiles and stray ejaculate as moments of sad-sack bittersweetness. It’s unquestionably a film of its time, but it plays out in a key that’s less like something by Joe Swanberg than something, like, by Savage Steve Holland. And while there’s no question it lacks polish, its comic voice is fresh, surprisingly nuanced and full of surprises. If I were programming a festival called New Directors/New Films, this is the exact kind of film that I would select: raw and made mostly by friends for a song, but something like a living bookmark for talent to watch.

The Harmony & Me teaser is embedded above. Here’s the info on its screenings.