Fairytale of New York: "Christmas, Again"

Santa hats off to any distributor attempting to vary our festive moviegoing diet. (I mean, seriously: there are people paying to inflict Elf on their kids again?) Last year, the tenacious folks at Bulldog gifted us the well-reviewed indie Christmas Eve at Miller's Point; this Christmas, they've dug further and indier still. The sole feature credit to date for writer-director Charles Poekel, Christmas, Again drew fond notices on its original US release back in 2014, yet went unscreened on this side of the Atlantic for understandable reasons: it boasts no especially prominent names or faces (unless you happen to be well-versed in the oeuvre of Kentucker Audley, one of 21st century indie cinema's true believers), a largely observational, low-octane dramatic approach, and only scrappy, stop-start bursts of action. Its indieness is most apparent in the sympathy Poekel demonstrates towards the footsoldiers of the festive season: those working in retail as the big day approaches. It would be reductive - not to mention tonally imprecise - to label this Clerks with fairylights, but that's not too far off the mark situationally. A prologue introduces the three-person staff of a trailer selling Christmas trees on a humdrum Brooklyn thoroughfare; they hang out, wind one another up, try to catch forty winks, make some rudimentary scratch. Much like the needle-shedding trees remaining at this late stage in proceedings, Audley's Noel (yes, the name does come up) appears more than faintly left behind: his friends live elsewhere, his loved ones have moved on, and any party plans have had to be postponed so as to take up the night shift - the night shift - on this particular stall. "Christmas sucks," shrugs one passer-by, which is not a sentiment you're going to hear during your fifteenth rewatch of The Polar Express. Funny thing is: like a baleful short story, it almost all feels true. Twenty minutes in, I conceded the possibility Christmas, Again may well have been shot around an actual street-corner stand, and that filming would have been stopped whenever paying customers interrupted Poekel's actors.

The sighing resignation of that titular again stands as a rebuke to the condescending (not to mention inaccurate) actually in Love Actually: Poekel's romantic subplot - concerning a mystery lady (Hannah Gross, the Julia Stiles lookalike who later turned up in Netflix's Mindhunter) who keeps returning to this particular spot on the planet - wouldn't be unrecognisable to Richard Curtis, though it's also hardly the stuff of Hallmark holiday movies. At one point Noel finds her blitzed on a park bench with one shoe missing and gum in her hair; for all the mistletoe scattered around the frame, the pair's interactions seem as likely to peter out as they are to blossom into something meaningful. For stretches, the pursuit of love is secondary to the graft involved in actually selling Christmas trees: that again is also an acknowledgement that there are those for whom this period is much like any other, to be worked through or otherwise endured. Poekel makes evocative use of his sparsely populated locations - we quickly grasp everyone's home for the holidays - and, as shot by Sean Price Williams, the tinsel and fairylights keep it from desolation and despair. Noel's befuddled interactions instead seem to take place in some surreal, drolly funny limbo, where you might at any moment be confronted by someone who wants the Obamas' Christmas tree (how very 2014), or a playboy-slash-operator-type who wants a stout Douglas fir to attract the ladies, or a philosophical Slav who comes on like a dimestore Jonas Mekas. At the centre of all this is a quietly lovely performance from Audley, a plaidshirted, hangdog David Arquette, whose zonked Noel is never quite on the same schedule as the perky joyseekers congregating around him, a man appointed king of a jungle he longs to escape. The film starts to sneak up on you between the point where you first get past the absence of conventional Christmas-movie wassailing and that where some (marginally) grander plan comes together for the put-upon protagonist; stay the full course, and your reward is a gorgeous, modulated coda. Worthy of revival and investigation - and far better for the spirit than sitting through Home Alone again.

Christmas, Again opens in selected cinemas from Friday.