Review: â€˜The Plagiarists’ is an adventurous comic thumping

Jagged and acrid, yet also slippery and provocative, “The Plagiarists� is a micro-indie talkathon with the edge of something forcibly overheard but fragmented, as if you’d been thrown into a cramped rideshare with many discursive routes and no obvious destination. Which is also likely the point of this anti-movie of a satire directed by Peter Parlow and written by James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Robin Schavoir.

The opinionated pair dominating this inquisitive space are cash-strapped artists Tyler (Eamon Monaghan) and Anna (Lucy Kaminsky), a young white couple helped by a kind older black man named Clip (William Michael Payne) after their car breaks down in the countryside.

Marking the sidetracked overnight stay are exchanges about art, dreams and life — Anna’s a struggling novelist inspired by their host’s wise, poetic expressions of childhood, Tyler’s a wannabe filmmaker emboldened by Clip’s stash of vintage camcorders. Six months later, Anna’s discovery of a familiar-sounding passage in a famous memoir spurs a sense of dread, that perhaps Clip had coopted someone else’s words when waxing nostalgic.

But her tinny outrage and Tyler’s own dogmatic logorrhea begin to feel like exhibits in a playfully prickly riff on the inauthentic, the massaged and the cagily appropriated when telling stories. The movie’s own awkward meta clues — the videotape look, the offbeat music, willfully choppy editing — are signals we’ve been lured into an intellectual art exercise rather than something conventional. And yet “The Plagiarists� is still an adventurous comic thumping worth the working over of your sensibilities.