GRADE: B+

It's been a long time since I've had such mixed feelings about a movie. The ingenious Dadetown is director Russ Hexter's first and only film -- the 27-year-old died earlier this year. There's been a rush to elegize this obviously talented filmmaker, and indeed, I'd be very interested to see what he came up with next. But the film itself creates problems for this viewer, some of them niggling but significant, and others overwhelming. You'll have to see it to understand what I'm talking about -- let's just say there's ultimately less to Dadetown than meets the eye.

Even so, what meets the eye is mighty compelling. Hexter and his camera crew arrived in Dadetown, New York, ostensibly to shoot a 15-minute documentary on small-town America for public television. What they found, and wound up staying much longer to document, was a monumental clash of ideals, spurred by an economy gone sour and made volatile by a corporation that recently set up sleek black-glassed shop on the edge of town. Dadetown is a factory town, where life is lived in the shadow of the giant Gorman Metals plant. The factory's glory days are over. Where the locals once manufactured airplane parts, they've been reduced to "metal-bending" functions -- they make staples and paper clips. Still, life goes on. Meanwhile, the giant API corporation has opened a new headquarters, bringing with it a slew of dislocated but well-to-do white-collar workers and their families.

It's hard for the locals to figure out what API does -- the letters stand for American Peripheral Imaging, which means next to nothing. It's clear that this new industry involves anything but paper, which makes the pathetic irony of Dadetown's outmoded industry all the more obvious. We see footage of API families admiring their jacuzzis and ergonomically designed fireplaces contrasted with the plain-folks concerns of Dadetown natives. Hexter converses with the locals at bars and coffee shops, while the newcomers pine for Cappuccino spots and Pizza Hut. Tensions come to a head when a massive wave of layoffs hits the factory, and the workers realize that their skills as well as their lifestyles are dangerously out of date.

Dadetown is a smart, savvy movie, and demonstrates an admirable willingness to document the end of a way of life without resorting to cheap sentiment. It's also remarkably complete, as though Hexter were willfully filming a treatise on the death of small-town America. The API employees enjoy a much better living than their native neighbors, but are almost impossibly clueless about the impact their arrival has had on this very traditional community. (The corporation's well-groomed PR spokesman is a particularly blithe specimen.) In particular, you may well wonder why most everybody seems fairly content to allow a film crew to wander this small town for several months, documenting its decline and, in a sense, its rebirth.

Dadetown never has the sense of immediacy and intrusion that so distinguished Roger and Me, which is to my eyes the superior film. Part of the reason I prefer Michael Moore's admittedly glib documentary (he does play fast and loose with some facts for the sake of a good story) is the presence of a consistent point of view. We know who Michael Moore is, where he's coming from, and exactly where his sympathies lie, and that helps us evaluate and keep tabs on his reportage. But it's harder to figure out where Hexter is coming from, and he's being deliberately obfuscatory. He puts on the airs of that fabled beast, the "objective" journalist, and while the movie does look like standard PBS fare for much of its running time, you get the distinct feeling that Hexter's a lot more savvy than that.

Even if you can't figure out what he's up to while the film is running, you'll get some information at the very end that will help clear things up. I can't argue with the importance and poignance of Hexter's subject, or the skill with which he explicates these issues, but what he's come up with as a whole seems to be a lot less than the sum of its parts. The way he's structured it, in particular, seems nearly insufferably clever. I can't give it a wholehearted endorsement, but Dadetown is that increasing rarity -- a truly thought-provoking film from a young American director. As such, I can recommend it highly.

(Keep your eyes open -- Dadetown was scheduled for a two-week run in Manhattan, and lesser hamlets may book it for even briefer engagements.)