Starring JimMyron Ross, Micheal J. Smith, and Tarra Riggs. Unrated. Plays Friday to Monday, January 30 to February 2, and Wednesday and Thursday, February 4 and 5, at the Vancity Theatre

Sometimes while watching Ballast, it’s hard to know whether you are more impressed by its realism or by its good intentions. Fortunately, since there are so few films that set out to do what this thoughtfully small drama does well, the viewer is not forced to make that decision.

The intimately shot tale centres on an almost mute Mississippi man named Lawrence (the hulking Micheal J. Smith) who discovers the body of a man who has just killed himself. When a concerned neighbour shows up, he has to stop Lawrence from following suit. It takes a long time for us to then discover that the dead man was his brother, and even more to find out that the brother was a twin.

We’re also left to intuit that angry young James (JimMyron Ross) is the dead fellow’s son, and that his mother (Tarra Riggs) is the deceased’s estranged wife. The three survivors have more than grief and anger in common, however; they’ve been left a ratty convenience store to run. In this woebegone, mostly black part of the Delta, that’s an asset that may prevent some of the despair that could otherwise push James into a life even worse than that of his father.

Writer-director Lance Hammer toys with melodramatic plot turns, mainly around the boy’s dalliance with drugs, guns, and gangs. But he’s far less interested in dramatic devices than in the simple unfolding of characters who are more complicated than they first appear.

But what really lingers here are the faces. Ballast’s nonprofessional cast displays an urgent, unvarnished reality that we often hide from in life and almost always hides from us in the movies.