A Song for Imogene (2024)

Sometimes you can just feel a movie before it really gets underway.  You can feel the tone that its going for and the world that its characters inhabit.  It reminds me how generic most movies are, taking place in drab, non-descript locations where hardly any life is taking place outside of the characters central problems.  What is refreshing about writer-director Erika Arlee’s A Song for Imogene is that it flows with the patterns of real life.  Its characters are grounded in reality and move with the means of their own desires and not with the manipulations of the screenwriter.  It’s a joy to experience a movie with this kind of confidence.

A Song for Imogene takes place in rural North Carolina in a natural space as weary as those who struggle within it.  There are spaces here occupied by overgrowth of weeds and grass settled upon by unkempt trailers and houses occupied by people whose daily routine, when not stammering to pay the bills from a measly paycheck wrought by the local supermarket, is a domestic routine of grabbing a beer from the fridge and realizing that life isn’t going to get any better.

That seems to be the fate of Cheyenne (Kristi Ray) whose dreams of becoming a musician have been sidelined by a meaningless existence with her live-in boyfriend Alex (Haydn Winston) who comes home from construction work, grabs a beer out of the fridge and fights with the broken cable box before slipping into bed for sex that’s not exactly romantic.  It results in a pregnancy that Alex doesn’t know about.

One night, she decides that she’s had it.  She slips out the door, takes her stuff and runs away to her mother’s house.  Her mother isn’t exactly a safe space; she’s a weary soul who sucks on cigarettes and beer and reminds her child that “The grass don’t get any greener, I can tell you that.”  Those turn out to be her parting words.  Not long after Cheyenne arrives, Momma passes away, leaving Cheyenne with the house that she intends to sell in order to make it out west.

The problem is that she ends up in a battle with three fronts.  Alex is blowing up her phone with texts wanting to know where she is.  The pregnancy is curtailing the future that she sees for herself.  And, back into the picture, is her sister Janelle (McKenzie Barwick) a wanderer with the young son who needs the house because she has no place to go.

What is amazing about all of this is that it never really goes where we expect.  The drama isn’t played to the rafters, there’s an organic flow to the issues at hand and nothing ever seems forced.  It’s nice to have a movie where you feel like you’re in the room with the characters rather than sitting in the fourth row of the theater.  The reality of these people and how they interact and how they deal with their issues comes from who they are and where they’ve come from, not in plot gimmicks.  This is the most organic drama that I’ve seen since Mud at least a decade ago.  What is most refreshing is that it has a sense of its characters and its location.  They are as weary and unkempt as their surroundings.

This is the kind of drama that you get absorbed in, not because of speeches but because of the kinds of patterns that you recognize.  Erika Arlee as writer and director never leads you by the hand, but rather leads you by the personalities on display.  Life has an unexpected flow here and it makes for great drama.