A micro-indie with a huge heart, 'Burt' tells a slender, stirring story of belated connection

You often perceive that abbreviated stories marque the champion movies, arsenic if the conception is to instrumentality thing compact and widen it with cinema’s scalability. But the reverse tin besides beryllium true: Certain movies payment from feeling pocket-sized and unfettered, arsenic if you’ve curled up with a tight, evocative abbreviated story, filled with conscionable capable humor, item and feeling to evoke a lukewarm glow.

Set implicit 2 days during the instant narration betwixt a hopeless young antheral from New York and a lonely older Los Angeles thoroughfare musician, the black-and-white micro-indie “Burt” from manager and co-screenwriter Joe Burke is 1 specified half-slice of bosom and calories, neither excessively overmuch nor undercooked. You could ticker a batch of films made with its equivalent fund (think that of a utilized 2007 sedan) and consciousness an ambition straining against constraints oregon a deliberate effort astatine slumming. Not truthful with “Burt,” the movie equivalent of a cherry sour driblet connected a time erstwhile you request thing a small tart, a tad saccharine and that won’t outstay its welcome.

“Burt” stars Burt Berger as, well, Burt Berger, a 69-year-old troubadour benignant whom we archetypal spot successful a sparsely attended coffeehouse plucking distant astatine his guitar and, arsenic if the ’60s ne'er went away, singing astir freedom. (Via Berger’s earnest, aged voice, the conception sounds hard-won.) Watching him intently is Sammy (co-screenwriter Oliver Cooper), who asks for a infinitesimal of Burt’s time. Over a picnic array successful a field, this kind-eyed, spindly musician, visibly dealing with Parkinson’s, is informed that Sammy is the lad helium ne'er knew helium had. To which you mightiness think: Finally, a movie that doesn’t discarded clip getting consecutive to what we’re already thinking.

Burt is tickled by the quality and precise rapidly wants Sammy to enactment overnight successful the humble North Hollywood location helium shares with his live-in landlord Steve (Steven Levy), a suspicious, rules-obsessed crank with mad-prophet facial hair, a nascent rootlike plot and, he’d similar this caller visitant to know, a gun. The distrust is communal for Sammy, but he’s trying to enactment focused connected getting to cognize Burt for reasons that soon go evident and which springiness this quirky, Jarmusch-inflected script an other dab of seriocomic urgency.

But “Burt” isn’t driven by narrative. Director Burke is mode much invested successful the interpersonal dynamics of oddballs than thing other and, to that end, a just magnitude of humorous hostility is maintained — from Sammy’s fearful accommodation of Steve’s peculiarities to immoderate contentious telephone calls with a haranguing aunt (Caitlin Adams) who lives successful a trailer park, is down connected rent and seemingly makes a good soup. Meanwhile, 1 of the much endearingly amusing aspects of “Burt” is however spiritedly the rubric quality takes to abrupt dadhood, particularly his contiguous adopting of specified phrases arsenic “No lad of excavation is …” and “That’s my boy!”

There’s nary mode for a wide moviegoer to cognize what the ratio of fabrication to nonfiction successful is simply a scruffy DIY entity similar “Burt,” with characters playing versions of themselves. (If Levy doesn’t person an agent, helium should see it.) And portion you don’t expect things to get sentimental, there’s a quiescent religion arsenic “Burt” shuffles on — its jazz-tinged euphony people a small unsmooth and the editing not ever creaseless — that the movie won’t disregard the feelings its manager has efficiently triggered. Most notably, Berger, whose beingness inspired the film, is simply a natural, casual to basal for and an perfect halfway for a movie with a warmhearted presumption of beingness arsenic champion appreciated erstwhile you tin acceptable speech your hang-ups and follow the occasional stray.