Small Engine Repair (15)
Star rating: **
Dir: Niall Heery
With: Iain Glen, Steven Mackintosh, Stuart Graham

Kentucky comes to Ireland in Niall Heery's debut feature. Set in a nameless town in the middle of nowhere, this is a world peopled by men of few words and faithless women, where the work is tough and the luck is hard. Iain Glen is the shy, painfully unassuming forklift truck driver who dreams of making it big in country music, Steven Mackintosh his loser friend and the owner of a small engine repair shop. Like everyone else in town, the pair are drifting along going nowhere. It takes the return of the local bad boy (Stuart Graham) to stir things up and make even these half-dead souls look again at their lives. The dialogue creaks like a rusty hinge at times, the accents are hit and miss and the country trappings - trailers, baseball caps, big beards, pick-up trucks and all - can only distract from the slight story for so long, but Heery's tale has a low-key charm and the music is toe-tappingly grand.