The overall Machoian project thus connects with that indie movement that sought to rediscover the parts of America that have gone underchronicled and underfilmed, but Integrity combines its burnished autumnal beauty - très Kelly Reichardt - with a thumping sense of internality. Crawford, who's done more in these two films than some performers do in an entire career, gives the protagonist a boyish levity you might expect from someone who's made his money sweet-talking folks into buying annuities, but Joe's also kidding himself, playing out in the woods with a gun as his new toy. (In an odd but effective choice, Machoian dubs baseball crowd noise over a scene of our guy pitching stones into the trees.) It's performative - the movie would be worth seeing just for the top-o'-the-world song the character makes up mid-hunt - and funny up to a point, but every now and again a flicker of darkness and frustration passes over these features, a sense Joe knows he's never going to be alpha enough, and he'll eventually submit to a near-total breakdown as the dramatic gods nudge him closer to making a hideous error. If the new film isn't quite as forceful as The Killing of Two Lovers - one of the great lost movies of the entire lockdown period - it nevertheless confirms Machoian as something of an expert in the loaded character study: that is to say, the character study that holds to the tension and twists of the best thrillers. It also amply demonstrates that, even in a movie context, patience is a virtue. Long takes and slow tracks reveal the consequences of Joe's posturing, suggest the grimly logical next step in his downward trajectory, and - at the last - capture a fumble towards genuine adult responsibility. (That title is not as ironic as it seems at certain forks in the road.) The real thrill here lies in being confronted yet again by an emergent directorial sensibility apparently unafraid of the pause for thought - and just as we clock the protagonist's surname tallies with his newfound gun hobby, so we might stop to wonder whether someone called Machoian might have had extended cause (perhaps, indeed, all his 46 years) to consider what it is to be a man. At a parlous moment for American cinema, the indie sector in particular, and what remains of the social fabric, it's stirring to see somebody out there who's absolutely and thoroughly doing the work.
The Integrity of Joseph Chambers is now streaming via NOW, and available to rent via Prime and YouTube.
