Available on DVD: “Putty Hill”

The young ladies of Putty Hill

In his impressive second outing — the deliberative drama Putty Hill — director Matthew Porterfield makes a simple but effective case that death isn’t quite so much about the dead as it is about those sorry suckers left behind to deal with it.

In this case, those grieving survivors are residents of suburban Maryland. They’re margin-dwelling Roseanne types, minus the punch lines at 45-second intervals. They’re decent people, but they’re sad people, which is often what happens when someone is one or two paychecks from nothingness.

And they’re all here to pay honor to a dead teen named Cory, an overdose victim.

There’s a shirtless tattoo artist. There’s a muscle-bound ex-con. There are cousins and a brother. There are troubled teens out the wazoo. Staying true to the film’s low-fi mumblecore roots, there’s nothing remarkable about any of them or their lives, really — aside from the fact that nobody seems particularly happy or anything resembling fulfilled. Maybe, it’s hard not to think, Cory is the lucky one.

We’ll never know for sure, because we never meet him, aside from the oversized photo at his karaoke-bar funeral. We do get to know a little about him, though, in the unconventional, confessional-style interviews with which Porterfield peppers his film — interviews with Cory’s friends, cousins and siblings. That blend of documentary and drama is an odd touch — and a jarring one at first — but it’s the fuel that makes this film go, mostly because of the high quality of the film’s naturalistic, often-improvised performances. With each succeeding interview, the story and the sense of quiet desperation trickles off the screen.

But "story" is probably the wrong word. Putty Hill isn’t a story-driven film as much as it is a situational one and a character-driven one. As such, it moves along at a measured, contemplative pace, the kind of film that is prone to long, lingering shots and that is awash in ambient sound.

In other words, it’s a film for patient moviegoers. But for those moviegoers, it stands to be a rewarding experience.