why no love?

Hah, that was exactly what I was thinking while watching it just now: Richard Linklater meets Gus Van Sant, with a little bit of Andrew Bujalski. But without Van Sant's self-indulgence or Linklater's technical sloppiness.

maybe it's because he stole the narration style from Drop Dead Gorgeous. What an underrated little flick that is. And it's the ultimate proof that Hellen Mirren has nothing on Ellen Barkin for sexiness at an old age. And Kirsten Dunst is the best female teen actor ever. In 1999, at age 16, she did Drop Dead Gorgeous, Dick and Virgin Suicides. Daaaang.

From this IMDb user.The documentary-style was so perfectly executed I thought it was mostly a documentary with some director's license dramatics. I loved how the film unfolded into a conventional Richard Linklater-Harmony Korinish-drama complete minimal dialogue and maximum in-the-moment real time reality of struggling urban people that resembled my own paternal family's struggles from the 1980's-early 1990's (even the clothes were the same, even the paintball guns seemed the same) so much that waves of my own memories of so many years spent with with my aunt, uncle, and cousins, and mother and father, signalled to me from inscrutable long-forgotten depths, shadowing the people on screen. I saw my uncle in the tattoo artist and my aunt in the grandmother wrinkled by a lifetime of struggle and burden and strain and cigarettes, and one of my cousins could easily have been the brother who died from the drug overdose, the tattoo artists' daughter my own uncle's daughter who also left home and behaved in a volatile antagonistic manner during holiday visits; when the documentary style meandered into a bit of the theatre of the absurd (crazy karaoke funeral wake) I knew for certain it wasn't a documentary, but was nevertheless thrown off with the tattoo daughter's stark startling screaming fit, and his reaction, been there done that authenticity, and thrown off again when the film steered into a claustrophobic Blair Witch moment, finally emerging into an impressionistic inkyblack expanse of time with drozing carlights traffic lights humanlights soullights randomly dancingstreakingskipping in spotlight across time's cosmicblack palette.Both Putty Hill and Stranger Than Paradise = 10/10

Why no love?

Because this is, in subject and style, quite an out-there creation. As such it will incite all the little film-dweebs to parade their coursework and quote their lecturers.

Which really is missing the point. This is a tender film, attached to its bumbling subjects in a way that reminds me oddly of Winters Bone or The Selfish Giant. Its artifice, most obviously the painfully slow pace and mumbling dialogue: well you guess what that's meant to convey or symbolize...
The invisible interrogator, jarring at first, is an eminently practical means of exposition that can allow the rest of the film to stay naturalistic.

So the film is both inaccessible and down-to-earth, arty and humdrum. I'm sure it'll be 'rediscovered' if Matthew Porterfield goes on to more high-profile fare.