This Irish film is an engaging tale of thwarted dreams and broken hearts, writes Michael Dwyer

AT THE Galway Film Fleadh a year ago this month, it came as no great surprise when the audience award for the best feature from a first-time director went to Niall Heery's warmly received Small Engine Repair.

Set in a rural Irish town, this affecting movie of dreamers, friendship, betrayal and guilt takes its title from the sign over the business run by Bill (Steven Mackintosh), a mechanic living and working with his bored son (Laurence Kinlan).

That title, in turn, comes from a song written by Bill's best friend, Doug (Iain Glen), who, in his mid-40s, still holds out

a glimmer of hope for success as a country music singer- songwriter. Doug's marriage has broken up and he has to contend with seeing his wife (Kathy Kiera Clarke) going out with another man. There are further complications when a volatile local man (Stuart Graham) is freed after serving time in prison for a hit-and-run crash and intent on finding out who "grassed" him.

With its striking natural landscapes, glimpses of westerns on television and a soundtrack of country songs, Small Engine Repair has the look and feel of an American indie production from the 1970s. It is distinctively photographed by Tim Fleming (Once), and unobtrusively edited by Emer Reynolds.

Writer-director Heery, formerly a director of short films and music videos, has crafted a picture of broken hearts and dreams - the very essence of country songs - with honesty and perception. He allows the intimate atmosphere to breathe and build as he leads us into the lives of his empathetically drawn characters. This is a buddy movie that acutely explores masculine insecurities and the consequences when the limits of male friendships are tested.

Revealing a rich singing voice, Glen is the movie's anchor, expressing Doug's pain in his songs and on his face, which is lined with a lifetime of failure, disappointments and low self-esteem.

Heery surrounds him with a small, perfectly chosen cast, in which the underestimated Mackintosh precisely catches the desperate self-delusion of Doug's closest friend. Even the more peripheral characters are firmly etched, in particular the hit-and-run victim's disconsolate father, played, in a few memorable scenes by Tom Jordan Murphy.