Paul (Paul Schneider, who co-conceived the story with writer/director David Gordon Green) is a twentysomething slacker who’s lived all his life in the same small Southern town, one of those places where life revolves around the economic travails of the local textile mill, and where everyone knows everyone else and all of their business. Paul’s day job, such as it is, involves mechanic work for his easygoing uncle Leland (Benjamin Mouton, best recalled as Julia Roberts’s suicidal junkie dad in Flatliners), and occasionally assisting his mother Elvira (Patricia Clarkson, The Green Mile, Far From Heaven), who entertains as a clown at the children’s wing of the local hospital and hires out for birthday parties and the like.
Paul’s true avocation, though, is sucking down forties of Old Style and chasing all the eligible skirt within the county lines, along with his three lifelong buddies: Elvis-coiffed rich kid Tip (Shea Whigham, Tigerland), philosophical Bo (Maurice Compte, Deuces Wild, Showtime), and goofy wisenheimer Tracy, known to his pals as Bust-Ass (Danny McBride). But that feckless approach to life changes the day Tip’s virginal teenage sister Noel (Zooey Deschanel, Mumford, Almost Famous) returns from a six-year sojourn at an all-female boarding school. Noel’s decided to forego college for the moment, to avoid, as she puts it, “four years of writing bad ‘girl poetry’ and listening to drum circles.”
Paul and Noel fall gently and genuinely in love with one another, much to the displeasure of Tip, who knows every intimate detail of Paul’s sexual history as a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kind of guy. As Bo tells Paul, “He [Tip] sees in you all the things he hates in himself.” But Paul is determined not to let either his strained friendship with Tip or the errors of his past—errors that appear to involve every woman in town under the age of 40—sabotage the first genuine love of his life. —DVDverdict.com
