The Fixer

Director Ian Olds’s fiction feature debut is a captivating tale set in the wildest back roads of Sonoma County, a place he richly renders as both a place of menacing secrets and an oddball paradise. After fleeing his home in Afghanistan, military interpreter and budding reporter Osman (A Girl Who Walks Alone at Night‘s Dominic Rains) finds himself unceremoniously plunked down amidst bohemian spirit-seekers and low-rent criminals when he’s taken in by Gloria (Melissa Leo), the local sheriff and mother of a wartime journalist friend. When Osman accompanies her on a domestic disturbance call, he comes face to fist with the charismatic yet vaguely sinister Lindsay (a nearly unrecognizable, long-haired James Franco). Against her warnings, the two strike up a tentative, unlikely friendship—until Lindsay goes missing and a backwoods gangster turns up dead. Unpredictable, ominous, yet surprisingly funny, The Fixer deftly weaves disparate tones to create a vivid, lived-in portrait of a California rarely seen in film. Supported through multiple funding rounds of SFFS/KRF grants, Olds’s film is perhaps the most anticipated Bay Area film of the year. —Michelle Devereaux