‘Bred Crumbs

I have fallen in love — as consuming as any — with a movie. And its music. And other music by the guy who made that music.

One step at a time. The movie is Colma: The Musical, made for an ultra-low budget on the doorstep of San Francisco. Unless you caught it in a film festival, or live in SF, New York, Atlanta, or San Diego, where it played one theater each this summer, you haven’t seen it. But it’s out on DVD Tuesday (11.20). Rent it. Buy it. Love it.

Colma is, as the title tells us, a musical, not in the super-choreographed production-number sense, but in a post-MTV way that makes smart use of split screens and what I call "meaningful walking." The voices are those of normal people, not overwrought divas, yet they’re tuneful and often beautifically melodic. For example, the premise-setting introduction, "Colma Stays," starts off mixing a semi-Broadway bounce and a near-disco oonsa and expands to encompass bass-driven melancholy and sweet harmonies that, surprisingly, evoke a country sound. Other songs run the gamut from a Grease-like rock set piece to an Irish drinking rag to the blatantly theatrical finale songs — all relentlessly hooky and engagingly staged. (Even when the songs toy with cliché, as the final ones do, the operative word is "toy" — you get the feeling the characters are struggling to believe the well-worn words they’re singing.) I picked up the soundtrack after my first viewing, and I still get a thrilling chill when a Colma song pops up in shuffle mode.

There’s a story here too, centered on three youngsters facing the world after high school, as filtered through their especially dead-end suburb. For those who don’t know, Colma, California, has more corpses than living humans. It’s where all the cemeteries that were evicted from San Francisco a century ago were relocated. Throw in a massive mall and an Auto Row, and you’ve got one soul-crushing berg, next door to San Francisco geographically but thousands of miles away psychologically.

To detail where the story takes these three is to spoil too much, not because it’s so incredibly eventful, but because a lot of the wonder of Colma comes from how it subverts coming-of-age tropes, how it keeps you involved with the characters even at their most unlovable, and how it nimbly relates the rapport of three people who have drawn supportive strength from how well they know each other, but have now reached the point where they realize they know each other maybe too well, and have begun, both accidentally and intentionally, to use that knowledge against each other.

Though the main three characters are superficially presented as a triangle, they really form a T. Colma’s main focus is the boys, dweebish aspiring actor Billy and caustic Rodel, a would-be writer who can’t organize his thoughts or feelings. Maribel, their ready-to-party gal pal, is a branch off their bond. She is both bridge and chorus, and also an anchor, the only one of the three who isn’t convulsing, who doesn’t see life in the City of the Dead as a fate worse than death.

Colma embraces the reality of growing up without resorting to dramatically trite milestones (getting married, having kids, or graduating high school, the latter of which is well out of the way before the movie starts). It also establishes its strong comic chops early, and while the movie does get more serious as it goes along, it never loses the sweet-and-sour sense of humor that gets it under your skin in the first place.

The movie’s accomplishment is all the more remarkable given its budget (it was shot in lo-def digital video) and obviously tight production schedule. Lacking resources, director Richard Wong, making his first feature, has found ingenious ways, simultaneously simple and ambitious, to flesh out the musical moments, sometimes with clever staging (like the hand-clapping partygoers and timely flash photography in "Crash the Party" and the slo-mo sidewalk activity during "Mature"), sometimes with strong editing that lets story play out while the songs do. Beautifully composed shots abound, the pacing’s perfect, and the lead performances, and most of the supporting ones, are spot-on.

I saw Colma twice in the theaters. Wanting to explore it between screenings, I hit the web, which led to the music of H.P. Mendoza, who composed the songs and wrote the screenplay for Colma and plays Rodel. I’d say start with Colma, and if you groove on that try both his freely downloadable albums, Everything Is Pop and Nomad. The newer Nomad is markedly richer and more mature that Pop, but both offer great songcraft and a compelling mix of a light-hearted geekly love of minutia (Mendoza is a professed fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and They Might Be Giants, which makes him all the more endearing) and sarcastically bitter, bluntly confessional personal drama. Mendoza’s not afraid to bare himself at the risk of making himself less sympathetic; the result is the opposite, and it’s likely much of what makes Colma so winning.

OK, maybe it won’t win over everyone. Some may find the production values unacceptably low, the singing not up to their American Idol standards. Sometimes, the synths are a little too Casio-like at the wrong moments. And the movie’s details may be too dependent on knowledge of San Francisco to play to a national audience. (Specifically, if you haven’t spent time trolling the suburbs south of SF, the faux-significance of lines like "Oh my God, they’re tearing down Lyon’s" may be lost on you.)

But you should really check it out if you’re game for a movie that’s funny, catchy, and involving; that shows how much can be accomplished without a premium budget; that dares to be unconventional without ever turning pretentious; and that finds meaningful truths in mundane settings, but avoids calling them out. Instead, you’ll get to unearth them as this wonderful little film, Colma: the Musical, rattles around in your head for days, weeks, and months afterward.