Bob Byington's new film has a lot in common with its predecessor R.S.O. (Registered Sex Offender): shot in Austin in a psuedo-documentary style, it follows a character wandering from one strange or mundane encounter to the next. The character runs into a lot of other quirky folk who happen to be played by fellow filmmakers or familiar Austin film scene faces. There is a plot, but it's largely hidden beneath the characters' personalities, the disconnect between scenes, and the seemingly stubborn avoidance of traditional story structure.

Unlike R.S.O.'s main character, who was funny but somewhat despicable, Harmony (the film's main character) is an every man of sorts: his girlfriend recently broke up with him (she is "still breaking his heart" because she hasn't finished the job), and he's sad about it. As the film goes along, he gradually works his pain out through his songwriting.

It was an odd experience watching this film in Los Angeles: far away from the familiar context of SXSW, where films with Byington's quirky humor and sensibility are the norm, the film felt both more stylistically bold and artistically less important here. R.S.O. had some brilliant interplay with the concept of merging documentary and narrative film (at one point the film's producer intervenes on screen and tells the lead character he isn't providing the type of reformation they were hoping for), but there's no such high mindedness that I could detect in HARMONY. It's more like Austin mumblecore meets THE OFFICE. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: there are lots of laughs to be had, and there are some great performances by a splendid supporting cast. To a particular audience, that will sound like a perfect unison of youthful love-spurned angst and deadpan humor. And on that level, the film is successful.

But I think it's interesting to consider the film as a representation of the work being done by a fairly good sized group of working independent filmmakers. In fact, the film is almost as intriguing as a cultural study as it is as a stand alone film. Byington is just one of a league of nearing-middle-age white male artists making films that explore these same themes through a similar aesthetic, whether wholly intentional and self reflective or not. Their rejection of traditional "production value" can either be interpreted as a striving for an authentic texture, or as a sign of amateurish meandering. Or, perhaps, as a sign that on some level production value no longer holds any intrinsic value (in defense of HARMONY, it does not beg us to take it seriously in the same way the other films I'm referencing might). How does it compare to a similar rebellion in the literary arts during the 20th century? The fact that this film was developed at the Sundance Institute (which "picked the project from among 2,200-plus others during that grant cycle as the sole recipient of its Annenberg Fellowship") and premiered at New Directors / New Films reveals a lot about the current landscape of independent filmmaking in America.

I'm at a crossroads: I hesitate to pass judgement, and see the language employed as something only newly made malleable, a (potential) movement in its infancy, and its speakers as harbingers of a further democratization of the medium that may or may not yield positive results. I fear I continue to beat a dead horse by covering this topic, but I must again reiterate the increase in angle of my eyebrow upon viewing this film amidst a unique audience. I cannot tell if the films continue to gain traction and expand their admirers, or if they have begun to grow stale in the public's eye.

At the end of the day, the fact remains: this film and others like it speak to a particular demographic of filmgoers in a unique way.