The languid pace effectively communicates the characters' crushing boredom, yet the dramatic interest never flags.

While the climax of Beneath the Harvest Sky is a jumble of crosscutting, thunderstorms, and an inconveniently collapsing house, the movie never loses the pulse of people and tragedies it knows too well.

For all its missteps, the film feels authentic. Through thick and thin, it stubbornly maintains a thorny integrity.

Directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly are documentarians making their fiction debut, and they pack the movie with seemingly authentic, nitty-gritty details about life in the potato country of far northern Maine.

Teenagers in a dead-end town aren't exactly a trailblazing topic.