I caught Deadbeat at Dawn in the Music Box Garden earlier this week as the finale of a three-night “triple nasty triple feature” co-hosted by Odd Obsession Movies and Deadly Prey Gallery. I had never heard of the movie, and I bought tickets mostly because I hadn’t been to the Garden yet this summer. I had no idea what I was getting into.

In very rough outline, Deadbeat at Dawn is about a former gang member, Goose, who loses both his beloved girlfriend and most of his friends to a rival gang, then sets out to even the score with more than a bit of the old ultraviolence. I will not be going into any real detail on the plot in the hopes that you will see it as I did, naive and full of wonder. I will say the movie makes spectacularly effective use of the fact that, from approximately 1980 to about 2000 (and arguably, in some cases, into the present), you could piece together the background for a pretty decent post-apocalyptic film simply by walking around any city in the Rust Belt with a camera. The general hopelessness of the period is reflected in the scenery: vacant lots, crumbling industrial buildings, gray skies. It’s a cityscape of ambient depression. The characters who populate the film are shitty, grubby people doing shitty, grubby things for third-tier drugs and frankly unimpressive amounts of money. It does not occur to them to want more, and as you move across their environment with the camera, you can see why. As a native Midwesterner, I was weirdly thrilled to see this on screen.

In addition to his karate-chopping, knife-throwing, parking-garage-rappelling turn as Goose, Jim Van Bebber also wrote, directed, edited and basically willed the film into existence after dropping out of college right before his sophomore year. It is completely over the top, but it’s also genuinely startling in its confidence and vision. This is a great fucking movie, and if it had been made by someone who lived in Los Angeles or New York, it would have been heralded as the birth of an auteur. The reason this movie – this great fucking movie – didn’t succeed is because it was conceived and filmed in Dayton, Ohio. For reasons unknown, Dayton and its artists are not beloved to God. (Look what happened to Brainiac.) People from other Ohio cities – cities even crappier than Dayton! Akron, even! – make it to the national stage all the time. Dayton remains a black hole, jealous of its talent.

You should watch Deadbeat at Dawn. It has a cast of amateurs and a budget of nothing. It is 80 minutes long, and it is insane, and it is perfect. Trailers cannot possibly do it justice. Critics fail. Seriously, go find this thing and come back so we can talk about it. I’ll wait.