What do you get when you cross the best parts of Footloose with your favorite Australian popcorn flick, a slightly startling aural aesthetic, and several engaging performances? Well, I don’t know what you’d get, or what I’d get, but second-generation writer/director Dagen Merrill gets Broken Hill, one of the most engaging teen melodramas I’ve seen in a long, long time. In a wondrous treat for the audience, Merrill’s script brings us into Tommy McAlpine’s conductor-wannabe mind through creative orchestration and unexpected visuals. I won’t say more than that… but sometimes cinematic magic is just about connecting certain familiar dots in ways that are engagingly fresh and off-beat—leveraging and exploiting expectations, rather than defeating them outright.

This is a decent little Big Hollywood picture that may, like Michael Clayton, remind you of classic thrillers from the 1960s and early 1970s. Despite what the trailers show you, it relies more on characterization and engaging dialogue than on flash, chase, and sizzle. And probably no CGI whatsoever. The heart of this Darkness is the surprisingly moving and convincing tale of a father’s relentless love for his daughter. The tension is derived from the narrative invention that this particular father is a Boston police detective. The wheels within plot wheels concern eco-terrorists, dirty-bomb terrorists, conspiratorial politics, and slimy corporate schemers. Oh, and little dashes of radioactive isotopes thrown about for good measure.