Starring Souléymane Sy Savané and Red West. Rated PG. Opens Friday, June 5, at the Ridge Theatre

With maybe a half-hour's worth of material stretched to 90 minutes by actors with limited resources, the low-budget Goodbye Solo rushes through important stuff just as it lingers over the readily apparent.

It was directed and cowritten by North Carolina–born Ramin Bahrani, who took an Iranian-realist approach to the even rawer Chop Shop and Man Push Cart. Their blasted urban milieus were so plainly and affectionately presented that it hardly mattered that nonprofessionals were carrying the narrative weight. Here, in a more scripted and tightly focused story, the weaknesses of Bahrani's storytelling are exposed, and the viewer is asked to accommodate a lot of amateurish business to get the most of too few strong elements.

The young filmmaker gets the hardest part right by casting two compelling personalities in the leads. The title character, a Senegalese taxi driver who dreams of working for an airline, is played by Souléymane Sy Savané, an actual former flight attendant from the Ivory Coast who has also driven taxis in Winston-Salem, where this was shot. And veteran B-movie actor Red West, who was variously Elvis Presley's driver, bodyguard, and songwriter, is a sad, tired old-timer who offers Solo a thousand bucks for a one-way ride to the ominously named Blowing Rock.

I liked this premise, and there is an interesting tension between the taciturn, chain-smoking redneck and the garrulous African who is insistently friendly to all—with an intrusiveness that invites being punched (repeatedly). Elsewhere, though, stiff first-timers have too obviously memorized their lines and, throughout, Bahrani employs clunky plot underlining. Lack of polish, or money, doesn't automatically mean art, however, and the ultimately insubstantial Solo offers too blank a canvas to take seriously.