The Independents (Greg Naughton, 2018):USA

Reviewed by Hugo Paxlind. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, 2018.

Rich is sitting at home playing his guitar when a man knocks on the door. he opens the door and in steps Greg who overheard Rich play. turns out Greg is a musician as well. after some guitar jamming together they decide to start a band. they set out on a roadtrip to play at a festival and on the way they pick up a drifter on the road (Brian) who turns out to be musically gifted as well. together they go on a journey to LA to try to make it in the music business.

Greg Naughton tries to deliver a ”feelgood” movie about friendship and music making it has some nice humor and authenticity to it, but most of the time i couldn’t help but to get distracted by the poor acting and dialog. Sometimes it feels just weird. there is one scene when Rich has a meltdown on a Meadow and runs out to scream at the top of his lungs and it felt as if they took their worst take and added to the film. otherwise it is a well made low budget production that has a nice cinematic look to it. you can tell that these guys are good friends in real life and that they like making music which seems like what they should be doing. sometimes it feels as if they are reading of a paper when delivering their lines which really doesn’t make any sense since they are friends in real life it feel like the easygoing dialog should come more naturally. i have to give props to the music though. throughout the entire movie they use their own music and it really comes through nice. if you enjoy guitar playing trios go see it, otherwise i would not recommend it.