Low-budget 'Nothing' is something
Nora Jacobson's ''Nothing Like Dreaming" has all the earmarks of an independently made regional production: It's talky, unevenly acted, and earnest to a fault. It's also heartfelt, intelligent, and shot with an assurance out of all proportion to its meager budget.
Above all, ''Nothing Like Dreaming" so well understands the region it portrays -- that part of Vermont where big-city sophistication clashes with small-town insularity -- that it makes you want to see more movies about this corner of the earth. If they're made by Jacobson, who in a previous life made a terrific documentary about urban gentrification (1992's award-winning ''Delivered Vacant"), so much the better.
The film's heroine, Emma Ericksen (Morgan Bicknell), is 18 years old and ready to take on the world. Or perhaps fight it to a standstill; ''Nothing" is extremely adroit about the ways youthful anger and idealism can paralyze people who have everything going for them. Emma has been accepted to Yale but isn't sure she wants to go; the death of her best friend (Siri Baruc) in a car accident sends her into an emotional tailspin.
On one hand is her unknown future, which is assuredly not in Montpelier and to which Emma's father Jess (John Griesemer), a state senator and classic nice-guy liberal dad, wants to hustle her forthwith. On the other hand are the injustices Emma perceives in front of her: the harassment of her slacker friends by the local cops, whom she believes are responsible for her friend's death.
As she mopes about downtown hangouts and vacant-lot parties, Emma befriends Sonny Gale (George Woodard), a gentle old cuss who hears voices in his head -- we hear them too, a constantly murmuring crowd -- and who's obsessed with building a ''fire organ." This contraption, an actual musical instrument made of scrap-metal pipes through which heated air moans and sighs, becomes the film's central metaphor: a thing of shabby, unacknowledged local beauty.
''Nothing Like Dreaming" at times piles on more plot than it can handle. Emma forces a hearing on the accident only to learn that the men in the black-and-whites don't necessarily see things her way; her friendship with Sonny, who has been tolerated by the authorities as a harmless outcast, threatens to end his state of grace; her mother (played by folk singer Rachel Bissex, who died of cancer this past February) struggles with depression.
Jacobson, however, isn't a storyteller as much as she's a gifted observer of people colliding in civic and emotional space. The State House sequences -- Emma works in the cafeteria, serving lunch to her father's fellow bureaucrats -- capture the hum of small-time government offices where everyone knows your name, like it or not. The director also gives us another Vermont: the one where teenagers are burned out before they've had time to come alive, and where poverty and mental illness suck people into forgotten rural pockets. The question of where Emma will be able to do the most good hangs over her like a guillotine.
Jacobson and her cinematographer Lasse Toft create a stark, swirling visual look that's leagues beyond most home-grown films and that makes the digital-video imagery cry out for a transfer to 35mm film. The acting is unsubtle but strong: Bicknell's Emma is as foolhardy and sympathetic as she needs to be, and Griesemer digs out the nuances of how a good guy might be a bad dad. Woodard's Gale remains an enigma, and I'm not sure how intentional that is. At the very least, you come out of ''Nothing Like Dreaming" wanting to hear more of that fire organ, and a lot more from Nora Jacobson.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. 
