Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C+

Potato Dreams of America is a locally produced film with a small budget, and it shows. I don’t say that to shit on it, because I actually enjoyed a lot of it, but I think it’s also a bit of fair warning, to viewers for whom that might be a barrier to entry into the story. And this is tricky, criticizing a movie that is a clear passion project by a writer-director who is telling an acutely personal, largely autobiographical story. There is no doubt that this film means a great deal to the people who worked on it, and especially writer-director Wes Hurley.

It’s certainly a story worth telling. There are just some challenges in execution, particularly in the first half, which is set in Vladivostok, the Russian west-coast city where the title character (as well as Hurley) is from. The production is highly stylized, giving it a feel rather like watching a well-designed local play. Unfortunately, with one notable exception, these “play” scenes are filled with supporting actors who give distractingly wooden performances.

The exception would be Lea LeLaria, easily the most famous person in this cast, here cast wildly against type as Potato’s uptight and conservative grandmother. She loses herself in the role so effectively, it took me a while before I even realized it was her. Still, these scenes could have used some tightening up in editing. Some of these scenes feel like Hurley decided he didn’t need very many takes. (For all I know, he didn’t have time for a lot of takes.) In one memorable shot, DeLaria’s grandma casually twirls a shotgun with her index finger, and the shot that’s used doesn’t even show it twirling very well. As a result, the vibe of the production becomes somewhat amateurish.

But, here’s a compelling concept: Hurley cast different actors for Potato’s family in Russia vs. his family in America, after he and his mother move to Seattle so his mother, Lena, can get married and in so doing escape post-Soviet Russia. Potato is much younger in the Vladivostok half of the film, and played by a boy named Hersh Powers; in the Seattle half, he’s played as an older teenager by a young man named Tyler Bocock. Bocock’s peformance is nuanced in a way unlike almost anyone else in the film, and he’s easily the best actor in it; I might even say he saves it. The woman who plays his unconditionally supportive mother, Lena, in Seattle (Marya Sea Kaminski), comes close.

Also, curiously, Lena and Potato speak with American accents in the Vladivostok half, and they speak with Russian accents in the Seattle half. This effectively highlights their “otherness” as a family unit in both contexts, although the delivery is more successful in the latter half.

“Potato,” incidentally, is just the nickname Lena has given him—one of the fictions added to an otherwise true story, according to Hurley just to help give himself some distance and see Potato as a character and not just as himself. There’s a bit of a shocking twist in the last act of the film regarding Potato’s American stepfather, which would be easy to dismiss as implausibly contrived, except apparently it’s actually part of his true story. There is a nice, organically multi-ethnic sense of intersectionality to Hurley’s story, with a bit of both lesbian and trans representation. Also, Potato’s circumstances are very specific, while the essence of his story, and its relatability, is universal. The semi-flamboyant imaginary-friend Jesus is a nice touch.

To be fair, some of the script, and particularly the dialogue, really is controvied—oversimplified representation of conservative talking points, particularly mirroring how they speak now rather than twenty or thirty years ago. (This is just my own pet peeve so I’ll forgive it, but a few shots of the Seattle skyline meant to be decades ago are clearly far too contemporary—but, we already established this is a small production. I’m sure there were no resources for making composite images of Seattle of the past.)

Potato Dreams of America isn’t quite as “quirky” as the title might suggest, although the film certainly does have its quirks. A lot of it, particularly in the first half, has some unrealized potential that bogs it down a little—but, by the end, it still spoke to me.

Overall: B-