If you are, like me, exhausted by the bombast of summer movie season, allow me to recommend an unassuming, lo-fi comedy that’s perfect counterprogramming to what’s currently rattling the walls of multiplexes. It has no big stars. It’s in black-and-white. It runs just shy of 75 minutes. Its entire budget wouldn’t cover a day of filming the latest Marvel blockbuster.
It’s called Burt, and it was shot for $7,000 over the course of a week in 2023. Director, editor and co-writer Joe Burke apparently submitted it to dozens of film festivals and got rejection letters from all of them. So he decided to self-distribute the movie, touring around the country hosting one-off screenings last year. Now it’s streaming.
I don’t know what those festival programmers were thinking, because Burt charmed me right away. It settles into an easygoing sweetness, offers a few surprises and delivers real emotion at the end.
This is one of those movies that mixes professional actors with people who have never been on-camera before. Burke cast people he met around L.A. and filmed them in the places they really lived and worked, and he captures genuine eccentricity instead of straining for it.
One of those real-life figures is Burt himself, a Los Angeles musician in his late 60s who has Parkinson’s. He’s played by a guy named Burton Berger, who really is an L.A. musician in his late 60s with Parkinson’s, and who the filmmakers saw performing at open mics around town. Burt still has dreams of one day making it big, and Berger, with his mop of curly hair and glasses that take up most of his face, has a sunniness that really sells it.
As the film opens, a rumpled New Yorker named Sammy (the film’s co-writer Oliver Cooper, one of the few professional actors in the cast) shows up in L.A. He approaches Burt after a gig and tells him that his mother just passed away, and that on her deathbed, she told him Burt was his father.
Burt is enchanted by the idea of being a father, bringing Sammy back to the house he shares with a cranky, skeptical old-timer named Steve. (He’s played by Berger’s actual roommate Steven Levy, and their scenes were shot in their actual house.) Steve doesn’t take kindly to visitors: He gives Sammy the third degree but still offers a home tour, stepping around the broken washer-dryer that’s been in the entryway for a year.
It’s little details like that washer-dryer that lend Burt its quirky credibility, and it genuinely seems to love the unusual people it’s about. I don’t want to spoil what happens to them, nor do I want to reveal Sammy’s true motivations, but this isn’t a movie about earth-shattering revelations; it’s about the rocky and cosmically funny twists of real life.
Burt has the same spirit as ’90s indies like Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Kevin Smith’s Clerks, in that they’re strange and funny but also play like documentaries about the people and places that happened to be there when the cameras rolled. This is a little jewel of a movie, and I mean it as a compliment when I say it’s refreshingly simple.