There’s a personal, handmade quality to The Go-Getter that overrides its underlying Amer-indie-isms; this second feature by Martin Hynes (best known for starring in the well-loved short George Lucas in Love) feels like something more than a calling card for future Hollywood employment.

On paper, the set-up is deadly cute: an isolated Oregon teenager (Lou Pucci) steals a car for a road trip to Reno to see his estranged brother, all the while engaging in a cellphone courtship with the vehicle’s sweetly enigmatic and increasingly flirtatious owner (Zooey Deschanel). But Hynes and his editor David Birdsell create compelling visual rhythms even as the script stays tweely on beat.
That the film’s formal gamesmanship and highbrow allusions are highly self-conscious (never more so than in a pair of Godardian vamps) doesn’t diminish their charms — not when the alternative is the flat sitcom aesthetic (and sitcom-level mean-spiritedness) of so many Sundance buzz-mongers. The Go-Getter doesn’t traffic in that kind of broad, needling humour: the highest compliment I can pay this fetchingly modest film is that it is definitely not this year’s Little Miss Sunshine.