Ten years ago, Matthew Smith, one of the more influential voices of his generation, played his final show and disappeared. Nobody has been able to find him, although plenty of people on the Internet and other places swear they’ve seen him or heard him perform. Especially affected was his then-girlfriend, Ellie Klug . She’s a music critic for a small (and dying) music magazine in Seattle and has hit a point in her 40s where she is completely burned out. Her editor knows this, and when Ellie produces yet another profile about an obscure guy with a guitar he tells her he wants her to find Matthew Smith.

Such is the premise of Lucky Them, a 2013 film written by Huck Botko and Emily Wachtel and directed by Megan Griffiths, which stars Toni Collette, Thomas Haden Church, and Oliver Platt. It was one of those movies that was produced and released independently (which means that it probably got a small release and then landed on deep cable or on a streaming service somewhere) and that I found a couple of months ago while scrolling through Kaonpy’s latest selections. The appeal for me was the actors involved–I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bad Toni Collette performance and I’ve enjoyed Thomas Haden Church since his days as Lowell Mather on Wings–but the story seemed interesting. Middle-aged people dealing with rock and roll pasts in some way or another? Sign me up.

At a glance, the film seems to have a premise similar to Eddie and the Cruisers, which is another of my all-time favorite rock and roll movies: a journalist investigates a hunch that a famous missing star is still out there somewhere. But whereas Ellen Barkin’s journalist in Eddie is more of a vehicle by which we discover the lives of the still-living Cruisers, Toni Collette’s Ellie is the protagonist of this story and Matthew is more of a macguffin.

Because Ellie’s an absolute mess. Though she is in her forties, she seems to be in a state of arrested development, forever living in the “just scraping by” days of her twenties. She’s behind on her rent, often drunk, and often hooking up with musicians when she really should know better. Or sabotaging the good relationships she has, like with Lucas Stone (Ryan Eggold), a singer-songwriter she discovers and even falls for.

The one person she doesn’t seem to completely screw up with, though, is Charlie (Thomas Haden Church), a former tech billionaire turned bored rich guy who she dated for like two minutes five years ago. They meet up again at a function and eventually he becomes her sidekick on the search for Matthew Smith. He buys a gargantuan RV for the two of them and then says he’s going to “shoot a documentary” of their investigation. Of course, said investigation takes Ellie way into her past and the film winds up being more about Ellie finding herself more than her ex-boyfriend (which we kind of expected anyway).

I’m not going to get too much more into plot than that so as to not spoil it, because for a movie that has a pretty well-worn premise, Lucky Them was a real treat to watch. Like I said, I don’t think that I’ve ever seen Toni Collette do anything subpar and she’s great here at making what should be an annoying character very likable. Because we’ve all seen the movies where the protagonist (male, female, or otherwise) is a complete mess and they spend much of the movie continuing to be a mess, much to the audience’s frustration. Ellie certainly screws up plenty of times, but Collette plays here with a sense of self-awareness that we don’t often get from these characters. Plus, she’s got great chemistry with Thomas Haden Church whose Charlie is a doofy, awkward, and sometimes dorky but lovable guy. He has such great comedic timing and I found myself laughing out loud at his line delivery. The rest of the cast is great as well: Ryan Eggold is young, attractive, and charming; and Oliver Platt does a great job of playing Ellie’s exasperated editor.

Lucky Them, even though it was released in 2013, has the feel of a late 1990s/early 2000s independent movie that you’d pick up at the video store on a whim (or because something you wanted was not available). With streaming obliterating what was left of the rental market and “binge-worthy shows” overtaking all of the streaming options, there doesn’t seem to be much of a place for small movies like this one anymore. And that’s a real shame, because watching this film made me realize how much I miss small movies. It’s a real gem and not only do I want to re-watch it, I want to find others like it.

Watch or Skip?

Watch.