Howard Spence (Sam Shepard) is a faded movie star. He's shooting a movie but abandons it to visit his estranged mother. He had been in a spiral of alcohol, drugs, and bad relationships. The insurance company sends Sutter (Tim Roth) to retrieve him. His mother tells him about a possible son from an old flame Doreen (Jessica Lange). He travels to Butte, Montana. He finds Doreen and her musician son Earl (Gabriel Mann). Earl is angry at the arrival. Amber (Fairuza Balk) is her girlfriend. All the while, Howard is followed by mysterious Sky (Sarah Polley) carrying an urn.Director Wim Wenders is trying to do something beautiful and poetic. The ambition is there but the execution is off. Firstly, there are unnecessary scenes and side trips. The point of this movie seems to be reuniting Howard with his son Earl. It needs to get there quicker and Earl needs to be more than an angry brat. Sky is an intriguing character. The writing is simply not there. The scene on the street where Lange confronts Shepard is electric. The two actors are powerful but the writing limits that power. There are quirky visual and story ideas but the dialog writing keeps this from being good. It's a real mix bag of high ambition, clunky writing, compelling characters, and non-compelling annoying characters.

Is this by the same Wenders who gave us "Paris, Texas," "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" and "Wings of Desire"? A half-hour elapses and absolutely nothing happens. I found myself utterly uninterested in Sam Shepherd's character, and almost fatally bored as I kept waiting for something, anything, to take place, even in an interior dimension. The atmosphere, poise, equanimity of all Wenders' great films is totally missing. While the storyline bears traces of Wenders' hand, its elaboration is hackneyed, drab and formulaic, bristling with a very non- transcendent cravenness. Open spaces often transfigure Wenders' heroes, but everything that happens to Shepherd is lapidary and impersuasive. This film is a consummate disappointment unleavened and unsalvaged by any of the characters trotted out.

Isn't is strange that two art-house movies come out at approximately the same time, made by directors who never craved mainstream fame and share significant similarities in plot? Well, this was exactly the case with Don't Come Knocking and Broken Flowers by Jim Jarmush. Both movies are about a man looking for a child he's never heard of before.Then they diverge and we follow Sam Shepard's character, a mid-aged wannabe cowboy wasting his life away. In a slow pace he unravels the mysteries of his past and find more than he hoped for.Don't Come Knocking is slow, but in this case it adds to the realism of the movie. And you get what you'd expect from Wim Wenders...

If you need a movie to show the absurdities of life, then "Don't Come Knocking" will be the perfect choice. Right off the bat, we have a proposition - the ultimate icon of male virility, a big, strong cowboy, running away. He is not escaping hardship. He is leaving a movie shoot filled with creature comfort, sex and all the drugs he can use. In his first act of atonement (or is it castration?), he gave up his horse, boots and even his spurs. Then he walked in his socks out into the desert.Surely a man suffering a mid-to-late life crisis should deserve some sympathy? But Sam Shepard, who co-wrote the script, didn't cut him any slack. In fact he had done such a good job playing this character, it is strange he wasn't even considered for an Oscar.So he went for a little walkabout in the wilderness. Did he have any vision? From the back of a bus, he saw a man in an electric blue suit wandering along the highway carrying a set of golf clubs.He decided to go home to mum; except for a little inconvenience of not having even called his mother for the last 30 years. In another piece of excellent casting, we see Eva Marie Saint as the forgiving mother. Of course, this is a Wim Wenders movie and mum isn't always as sweet as apple pie.Now in the sanctuary of his mother's home, our cowboy looked back at the follies of his life. The director arranged this in the form of a scrapbook of tabloid's clippings. We are left wondering like the hero on what is true and what is not.But the ranch he had known as a boy is no more. Instead, his hometown had been turned into a frontier casino. He didn't even recognize someone who claimed to be his high school classmate. Disillusioned, our hero fell again. In his movie, he would have ridden off or die in a hail of bullets "Just Like Jesse James". But he was ignominiously arrested and sent home like an errant teenager.In the midst of sorting out what left of his life, his mother let on that he may have had a son out of a movie set fling. Off he went in search.And hot on his heel is a bondsman who had underwritten the movie. The Hollywood template would be a tough muscle man in an action packed chase. Nope, we have Tim Roth in yet another brilliant performance. Just like our hero, our bondsman is a loner. While he may be comfortable in his own cocoon filling out crossword puzzles, he does make feeble attempt to connect. He just yelled out loud into the desert asking if anybody is out there.Into the last third, we have all the players coming in for the showdown.Kiss and make up? Got two. One, in front of a gym with guys on their exercise bikes looking on. The other, a hilarious swipe at the classic screen finale.Gunplay? Yeah, a single shot. In a scene that starts off with a wonderful time lapsed photography of a car in a deserted parking lot, the usual cowboy / Indian drama is inverted onto its head.Don't watch this movie if you can't afford to have it haunting you. It is like a Zen koan, it will just keep buzzing around your brain. Don't believe me, I'm writing this at 5 in the morning.