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'Don't Come Knocking' wanders, but always has something to watch

By STEVE MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In the road-trip saga "Don't Come Knocking," getting there is more than half the fun — it's most of the fun in a movie that runs out of gas just when it should be shifting into high gear.

The second collaboration between director Wim Wenders and writer-actor Sam Shepard (after 1984's "Paris, Texas"), it centers on fading movie star Howard Spence (Shepard), who saddles up a horse, gallops off the set of his latest Old West flick and escapes into the modern true West. You know, the one with rusted trucks, broken-down trailer homes and satellite dishes as common as tumbleweeds.

Sony Pictures Classics

'Don't Come Knocking'

B-

The verdict: Half an engaging road trip, half a vague wander in a lonely town.

Director: Wim Wenders
Starring: Fairuza Balk, Eva Marie Saint, Mike Butters, Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange
Run time: 110 minutes
Release date: March 17, 2006
Rating: R for language and brief nudity.
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Meet the director
German-born director Wim Wenders discusses the lonesome wanderers who populate his films.

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

While the studio dispatches an insurance operative named Sutter (Tim Roth) to track down the runaway star, Howard visits his mother (an unflappable Eva Marie Saint). Living in a tidy house with a neon-red nighttime view of the casinos below, she doesn't let her precise widow's routine get unsettled by the arrival of the roustabout son she hasn't heard from in 30 years. When a cop deposits him on her doorstep after a drunken night at the casinos, her main concern is that Howard's breakfast is getting cold. (This summer, Saint welcomes home another wayward son as Martha Kent in "Superman Returns.")

The small, laid-back pleasures of these scenes then give over to the movie's slim plot: Howard's mom tells him about a woman who called a couple of decades ago, saying she was carrying his child.

Howard's disbelief turns to curiosity, and he heads to Butte, Montana — if not to find this woman, Doreen (Jessica Lange), then at least to do something. It's clear by now that he's an emptied-out mess. Stardom, drugs, liquor and floozies don't work for him any more. He just doesn't know what might.

But when Howard arrives in Butte, the movie starts spinning its wheels and becomes self-consciously quirky. Howard reconnects, tentatively, with Doreen and meets the hothead son he never knew he had, Earl (Gabriel Mann). The other main players: Amber (Fairuza Balk), Earl's obnoxious, Goth-chick girlfriend, and the ethereal Sky (Sarah Polley), who drifts around carrying the sky-blue urn of her mother's ashes. Earl and Sky are diametric son/daughter figures. He's flying out angrily all directions. She's calm, quiet — a center of gravity. That makes them both distinct, but not really credible characters.

Butte becomes an empty-street soundstage for the characters' halting exchanges and over-the-top shout-downs. Mann (who's out of his depth as an actor) even gets to throw all his apartment's contents out the window. (No one else in town seems to notice the sofa blocking the street.)

The movie always threatens to have something interesting to say (like many of Shepard's plays) about the frayed but unbreakable bond between children and their fathers. It just never quite says it.

As usual, Shepard makes an engagingly laconic presence. Oddly, though, his longtime love Lange, either because of or despite their familiarity, turns in an affected, tic-y performance. Polley is engagingly sincere. But Balk should be officially forbidden by the Screen Actors Guild to ever accept one more strung-out, purple-haired, loudmouth waif role. Enough already.

Though "Knocking" can test your tolerance for symbolic whimsy, it's worth a look for, well, its look. Cinematographer Franz Lustig makes Butte a thing of great, melancholy beauty. In saturated colors, he evokes the early 20th-century architecture and sun-and-shadow compositions of Edward Hopper's paintings. He also gets memorable images in the first half, including the sight of a film-set crew member riding his Segway amid the sierras. So even when the movie's script drifts, there's always something to watch.

"Don't Come Knocking" is the kind of movie you stretch out in, wander around, and — like the characters onscreen — just let happen to you.