By Dennis Harvey

JUNEBUG IS A movie about culture clash that itself benefits from creative clash. Its director, Phil Morrison, and its screenwriter Angus MacLachlan, are on almost entirely different pages despite the fact that they're both North Carolinians. Their disparate approaches are apparent even in the press kit, where Morrison's "director's statement" is very pretentious (he duly name-checks Minnelli, Kiarostami, and Bresson), while MacLachlan's comments are direct and humorous. When movies go wrong, pin-the-blame-on-the-donkey speculation usually centers on either the director or writer. Who betrayed whose vision? Junebug is a rare case in which those two principal collaborators are clearly operating from sensibilities that ought to cancel each other out – yet instead, the tension between them lends the film texture and depth it might never have had otherwise.

Without meaning to dismiss the deliberate craft they both bring to the table, I think this indie drama has the unexpectedness of a wonderful creative accident. It's one of the year's best releases, though the lack of any easily encapsulated story hook or obvious marketing point means you'll have to catch it fast. Low-key and low-concept, it's as far as you can get from The Aristocrats, which will be hogging all the attention at art houses this week.

Too thin, too refined, too friendly and faux-casual in learned ways, 40ish Brit émigré Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) is the type of veteran scenester that dominates every reasonably sophisticated US city's aspirations toward artistic vibrancy. She happens to be a dealer for a Chicago art gallery, but she'd be even more familiar in the context of SF or NYC – one more trend surfer showing up at every opening, facilitating artist-to-artist introductions, hanging at cafés, expensing lunches at this month's hot restaurants. She's so ubiquitous to so many people that it might never occur to them that she probably "has no life" of a private nature.

That changes in Junebug's fast-forwarding first scenes, when she meets handsome, younger George (Alessandro Nivola), whom she marries after a whirlwind romance. They're barely past honeymooning when business lures her down to his native North Carolina – there's a folk-art painter, one David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor), she's desperate to sign as a client before the rest of the dealer world "discovers" him. While down thataway, there's naturally no reason the couple shouldn't spend some quality time with George's Winston-Salem family as well. A man of enigmatically few words, George offers no explanation for why he hasn't visited them for several years.

Wark, whose mixture of slow-wittedness, evangelical fervor, Civil War buffdom, and good-ol'-boy racism comes through in his striking canvasses (actually painted by Ann Wood), proves easily wooed – at first. Winning over the clan she's married into, however, doesn't go so smoothly for Madeleine, whose regulation casual-chic black clothing, air-kissy intimacy, and therapy-speak suddenly look phony in this very foreign context.

Most suspicious of her is George's mother, Peg (Celia Weston), a bullish matriarch who no doubt fancies herself the glue that holds this family together. But she's more like the nail gun that holds its members stiffly in place. Instantly judging Madeleine as being all about the wrong things ("She's older, too pretty, and too smart. That's a deadly combination"), Peg channels low-watt hostility toward her new daughter-in-law while bossing around everyone else. Overmatched, dad Eugene (Scott Wilson) has long since withdrawn into quasi-senile muttering and crafts projects.

Least happy to see George home is sibling Johnny (Benjamin McKenzie), whose unarticulated grudge clearly stems from the fact that big bro's "model son" status left him doomed to be the designated fuckup by contrast. Which role he lives up to, being surly, foulmouthed, and generally turdlike. He takes his frustration out on high school sweetheart turned wife Ashley (Amy Adams), a breathless fountain of gee-whiz amid the dry-creek emotions of her adopted family. Thrilled to death by her "new best friend" sister-in-law's city style and intelligence, Ashley is a tabula rasa aching for somebody to write on her. It couldn't hurt – heavily pregnant, she's so haplessly unschooled that she's trying to diet the weight off before giving birth.

That latter event is key among several that bring the script's myriad psychological conflicts to a satisfying, bittersweet, and resonant head. MacLachlan, a playwright, knows just how these middle-class Carolinians say everything but what's awkwardly most important. Without spelling anything out (well, almost never), he creates characters whose backstories and current complexity are as palpable as they are half hidden.

Adams won a special acting award at Sundance for her adorably dizzy Ashley, who's like Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey transplanted to Tobacco Road. But the entire ensemble is perfect. In particular, McKenzie makes Johnny a very compelling asshole-on-the-surface (an inspired glimpse of him at work reveals a whole other side to his personality), while Wilson adds another quietly genius portrait to a career gallery of invisible men, from the sad-faced killers in In Cold Blood and The Great Gatsby to Monster's saddest kill.

If MacLachan's work is naturalistic to an almost vérité degree, that of Morrison – who's directed commercials, music videos, and episodes of offbeat series such as Upright Citizens Brigade and The Adventures of Pete and Pete – is abstract, self-conscious, and mannered to the brink of ruin. Among his attention-calling tactics are arrestingly inappropriate music choices (uh, Vivaldi?) and Diane Arbus-like considerations of banal decor and pasty-faced people, plus a soundtrack that occasionally fades to silence, just cuz.

Like fellow Southerner David Gordon Green, he risks being too much of a conservatory artiste to suit the working-class "real" people he takes as dramatic subjects. Yet somehow all these affectations end up enriching the material, making it more mysterious. As good as it is, this screenplay might have come off as just a decent Hallmark-style TV movie if directed for straightforward laughter and tears. One final lure is the promise of an original score by Yo La Tengo, though to be honest I didn't notice anything that sounded like them for the entire 107 minutes. That may be due, however, to the manner in which Junebug grows absorbing – so subtly and completely that you might miss some details entirely in the attempt to catch them all.

'Junebug' opens Fri/12, Embarcadero Center Cinema, 1 Embarcadero Center, promenade level, SF. (415) 267-4983; and the Albany Twin, 1115 Solano, Albany. (510) 464-5980.