If there’s a throughline to the films screening within the various competions and sidebars at CineVegas, it’s that those marked by qualities that would make them anomalies at other festivals here play as standard fare. You come here expecting to see genre hybrids (such as Alex Ross Perry’s verite-style comic WWII fantasy Impolex, or Cory McAbee’s half-animated space cowboy sci-fi musical Stingray Sam, about which much more later); stylish art films that push the boundaries of craft and form but may not offer the pleasures of a traditional narrative (see Asiel Norton’s Redland — or don’t, if gorgeous experimental cinematography isn’t enough to interest you in a story that drowns itself deep in elliptical abstraction); or superindie narratives that make up for what they lack in style with balls-out attitude (like Bob Byington’s Harmony and Me, which seems to get more anarchically funny each time I see it). At this festival, it’s the movies that you can imagine premiering on any other major festival’s lineup that seem most out of place, that have the ability to shock for the simple virtue of their traditional professionalism.

And so we come to Easier With Practice, a dramedy written and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, based on a true story published by FOUND Magazine founder Davy Rothbart in GQ. Rothbart, who travels around the country with his brother promoting his magazine and books, answered the phone one night in a motel and eventually found himself in a long-term phone sex relationship with a mysterious stranger. Easier with Practice stars Brian Geraghty as a writer named Davy who, whilst on a roadtrip with his brother to promote his book, answers the phone in his motel one evening and allows the sultry female voice on the other end (Kathryn Aselton of The Puffy Chair) to talk him into a session of mutual masterbation, which leads to an ongoing relationship which renders Davy basically incapable of participating in real life.

What’s interesting about the film (beyond the fact that it seems to stay extremely faithful to Rothbart’s too-good-to-be-true real experience, if anything amping up the character’s social imcompentence) is the fact that Alvarez has taken material dark and difficult enough to mandate an indie production — it’s basically a movie about loneliness peppered with large doses of explicit sexual language, and as such, it simply would not get produced by a studio in its current form — and churned it into a slick crowdpleaser. Shot on the RED camera, it’s got the distinct look of a pre-video road trip indie. The story arc leads to a reveal that’s shocking in its specific details, but not in its existence — there’s a wave of surprise, but not one extreme enough to throw a viewer. Geraghty sinks so deep into nerd drag that he’s unrecognizable as the same actor who plays the third lead in The Hurt Locker. All in all, everything just works — there’s an ease to the filmmaking that allows the universal elements of the story to come through. That it’s a film without obvious rough edges or blatant challenges to and audience makes it, at CineVegas, an anomaly; in the world at large, that’s exactly what will probably make it very appealing.