The Mend

Somewhere in the tatters of plot and narrative incident that comprise "The Mend" there's a lean, quirky, powerful indie movie waiting to be excavated, polished up, and unleashed on the world.

Sadly, that nugget currently resides in a sloppy nest of undisciplined writing, choppy editing, and a music score that's utterly inappropriate for the film's moods and tone.

Josh Lucas turns in an affecting performance as Mat, an aimless man with enough emotional and mental health issues to warrant whole pharmacies worth of meds -- none of which he seems to be on. Stephen Plunkett plays his put-upon brother, Alan, who already has enough on his plate trying to deal with his performer girlfriend, Farrah (Mickey Sumner), when Mat appears in their apartment during a party.

The party scenes drag on far too long (though there are some witty throw-away lines and enjoyable performances by a bevy of bit players). When the movie emerges on the far side of the festivities, Alan and Farrah have left for a vacation, leaving Mat in charge of their place... a mistake, they surely must know, and one that's compounded when Mat, who is on the outs with his own girlfriend, Andrea (Lucy Owen), coaxes Andrea to come over and bring her son.

Andrea seems stable enough, though that might be relative only to Mat; she does fly into screaming fits on occasion. When Alan shows up, back early and alone from the trip, Andrea is sufficiently in possession of herself to act as a calm, buoying influence over him. It seems that Farrah has left Alan; when a fight erupts between Mat and Andrea, both guys end up single (at least for the moment), and full-fledged bachelorhood, with all its filth, excesses, and recklessness descends, with drunken nights, vomit-besmirched T-shirts, pissing in the kitchen sink, and slovenly conditions becoming the general state of things. (A power outage pumps the chaos up another notch.) Movie and men alike slouch toward some sort of resolution, but it's hard to parse the through-line from the detritus and encroaching air of overall mayhem. A cleaner edit would make the film's comedic nature more readily apparent, and there is some pretty funny stuff here.

Only as the film ambles sluggishly into its final reel does the pace pick up and the production tighten into something brisk and effective -- even the music seems imported from some other, more ably put-together movie. Up to that point, "The Mend" seems like an exploded version of the Martini Brothers' 1999 mumblecore comedy "Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire."