THIS is a film about a small town with a population of 61. There are invariably two types of small towns in small town films. One, the horror kind, usually involves a dark, often murderous secret, like it is devoid of children because the people ate them all. The other kind of cinematic small town is the folksy, sunny sort of place, where people maybe seem a little off-kilter, but hey they're wonderful all the same. This falls into the latter bracket. The only problem is that the people in this town aren' t interesting enough to deserve the full attention of a feature film. They are just too plain ordinary.

The basic premise is that a group of four best-of-friends are about to leave the tiny town of Dancer. However, most of the people there, for various reasons, want them to stay. So the four of them, all good, clean-cut white boys, spend the rest of the film weighing up whether they should hit the road for the metropolis, L.A., or stay. This entails the kind of scenes that you expect in your run-of-the-mill soap opera. One boy has to come to terms with his distant rancher father, another with his alcoholic father, another with his overbearing mother. There are girlfriends and eccentric relatives, and of course, the desert scenary. But, when ultimately the issue is simply whether the boys make a bus trip or not, the film ends up being as exciting as a Texan landscape. The sense that this is too nice a film to be interesting is overwhelming. Weighed down by a feel-good agenda, the characterisation ends up being sappy, while the conclusion is stunning for its flimsiness.