A rock journalist (Toni Collette) is given the impossible assignment to hunt down a long-unseen revered local musician, and is joined on the road by a music-hating, aspiring documentarian (Thomas Haden Church), in director Megan Griffith's edgy comedy.

Charming, funny, lively, moving — all the requirements for a complete and satisfying film experience can be found in Megan Griffiths's latest, set within the world of Seattle's indie music scene. Lucky Them introduces us to Ellie Klug (Toni Collette, also at the Festival in Enough Said), a veteran journalist for a music publication. Talented but hapless, appealing and irritating in equal measure, Ellie is immobilized by unaddressed issues from her past that have returned for an unexpected encore.
Ellie is called up one day by her intrepid editor Giles (Oliver Platt), a man badly in need of an attention-grabbing cover story. He asks Ellie to investigate the ten-year-old disappearance of a revered local musician — who also happened to be Ellie's long-time boyfriend at the time he went missing. Having not produced anything of note lately, and knowing her job is on the line, Ellie reluctantly agrees to take the assignment, even as her erratic, booze-soaked relationships with younger musicians continue to clutter her life. She convinces herself there will be no need to unlock her own crippling emotional baggage around her lover's departure and her sense of having been abandoned. For the road trip, she grudgingly accepts the companionship of music-hating, aspiring documentarian Charlie (Thomas Haden Church), whose confusion regarding matters of the heart is only matched by his inept filmmaking.
Lucky Them is about how we mythologize
those we love — especially those we have
lost — and how this skewed idolatry impedes
anything new and hopeful. The semiautobiographical
nature of co-screenwriter
Emily Wachtel's story undoubtedly gives
the film its emotional edge, and, combined
with Griffiths's crisp direction and her
cast's sharply observant performances, the
result is nothing less than one of the most
enjoyable films of the year.
Jane Schoettle