"Junebug" is a small, astonishing movie-about the South, and Outsider art, and cultures banging up against each other-with a first-time director and a remarkable cast.

Phil Morrison, the director, and Angus MacLachlan, the writer, have created a quiet, subtle story of fallible people who manage to connect in spite of their flaws. They've done it by focusing on a middle-class Southern family and an interloper from the North, meanwhile avoiding clichés and delivering empathy.

The South is America's strange stew-pot of sorrow and survival, where racism is racism is just below the surface, yet the inhabitants somehow muddle through in spite of it.

"Junebug"'s simple plot begins with the mating of a Yankee art dealer, Madeleine, played by Embeth Davitz, and a self-contained Southerner named George (Alessandro Nivola). Their sexual chemistry is established immediately, but little else is revealed about either character at first.

Madeleine decides to pursue a contract with an "Outsider" Southern artist, David Wark, portrayed by Frank Hoyt Taylor. The recently married pair head for North Carolina to get Wark's name on the dotted line and, incidentally, to introduce Madeleine to George's family.

Here's where "Junebug" gets down to business, introducing a group of Southerners who are eccentric as individuals, locked within themselves in spite of their regional good manners, and wholly engaging.

Chief among them is pregnant Ashley, portrayed by the astonishing Amy Adams. Adams is a gorgeous, redheaded peony among her more restrained in-laws: husband Johnny, George's kid brother, a brooding malcontent (Benjamin McKenzie), mother Peg (wonderful Celia Weston), and father Eugene (Scott Wilson), a man of few words and heavy silences.

Davitz gives a controlled but powerful performance as the alien in the house. Weston is equally strong as the matriarch who just plain mistrusts outlanders, including Madeleine.

But it is Ashley who holds the entire movie together. The young mother-to-be is beautiful, mad about her sullen husband, immediately taken with the newcomer, full of questions and confidences and pure, old-fashioned Southern charm. Adams is already being touted as an Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actress.

Still, the main credit goes to Morrison and MacLachlan. The young men have been friends from their boyhood in North Carolina. They both have a deep understanding of the story and the characters, and they show how love can, indeed, conquer a whole lot, if not all.

Courtesy photo