Easier with Practice

‘YOU CAN buy my collection of short stories from my brother,” says Davy Mitchell (Brian Geraghty), a self-published author hawking a vanity collection of short fiction on a DIY tour of under-populated bookstores.

One night, between prose readings (“Some call it longing but I call it silence”) and squirming as a witness to his sibling’s marital infidelities, Davy gets a phone call from a mysterious random dialer, Nicole (Katie Aselton). Their chat soon turns into phone sex; phone sex soon turns into a genuine emotional connection; genuine emotional connection soon produces a killer twist.

Working from a biographical, stranger-than-fiction GQpiece by Davy Rothbart, writer-director Kyle Patrick Alvarez has crafted an elegant film from a fascinatingly tawdry tale. In common with other superior award-winning indie-schmindie crossover sensations, Easier with Practicehides its budgetary constraints behind a preponderance of static tableaux; it's not being cheap; it's maintaining the aloof distance of Todd Haynes and the natural stagecraft of John Cassavetes.

It helps that Geraghty, the nervy one from The Hurt Locker, does impressive work in a role that requires his constant presence. The actor's soft tragicomedy is enough to keep us onside with a tricky protagonist who is occasionally given to pretentiousness, narcissism and anonymous telephone masturbation.

Behind the leading man's forlornness and the director's inquiries into alienation and off-site romantic obsession lies a car-crash moral. Like the recent social networking documentary Catfish, Easier with Practiceis art aspiring to the condition of urban myth. Its world may be bohemian and its dilemmas thoroughly modern, but if the Jacobeans had got around to making dramas about the dangers of getting moist with unseen strangers, the result would have looked something like this film.