By Stephen Garrett

With all but one of the Dramatic Competition films unspooled, Sundance has recovered fitfully from a soft start with a handful of accomplished works showing that the pulse of independent American film is still steady and strong. Among the first to give the festival its muscle is "Hustle & Flow", Craig Brewer’s improbably earnest drama about a pimp who decides to become a rapper. Mainstream in its execution, leavened with self-effacing humor and buoyed by a charming cast, this crowd-pleasing underdog story takes an almost ridiculous premise that just as easily could have ended up on "Chappelle’s Show" and turned it into a rousing fable of reinvention.

[A scene from Noah's Baumbach's "The Squid and The Whale." Photo courtesy the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.]

Also heating up the race for top prize are a trio of original, well-written and technically mature productions: playwright Craig Lucas’ "The Dying Gaul," music-video director Mike Mills’ adaptation of Walter Kirn’s novel "Thumbsucker," and Noah Baumbach’s semiautobiographical divorce drama "The Squid and the Whale."

Following up his richly textured script for "The Secret Lives of Dentists," and enlisting castmember Campbell Scott, Lucas makes his directing debut by adapting his own stage play "The Dying Gaul," a deftly woven L.A. story circa 1995 about an unsuccessful gay screenwriter (Peter Sarsgaard) still mourning his dead lover whose work is optioned by a closeted studio executive (Scott). When the executive seduces the screenwriter into a relationship, his unsuspecting wife (Patricia Clarkson) stumbles onto his secret and uses the then-novel access of anonymous internet chat rooms to manipulate the screenwriter’s emotions. Revealing a bold eye for visual composition and a supple skill for opening up his three-character chamber piece into a Hollywood parable about the movie industry’s sexual-emotional schizophrenia, Lucas makes an auspicious transformation into cinematic auteur.

Mills as well makes the transition to feature filmmaker with similar self-assurance. "Thumbsucker" takes advantage of widescreen cinematography to convey his story of a quiet, insecure teen (Lou Pucci) who gains larger-than-life confidence after being prescribed speed-equivalent medication to help wean him from his thumbsucking, unfocused personality. Stylized without being extravagant and understated in its performances (especially Vince Vaughn, whose turn as Pucci’s wry high school debate coach has a gravity not generally seen from the actor), Mills has created a delicate portrait of slowly-blooming self-confidence despite the crippling strain of adolescence and emotionally unavailable parents.

Also exploring the relationship between parents and children is Baumbach, whose "Squid and the Whale" is his best film yet, a fully realized and finely tuned study of loyalty, betrayal, desperation and forgiveness. A 16-year-old and 12-year-old choose sides when their dad, a faded man of letters (Jeff Daniels), and his new-literary-voice wife (Laura Linney) decide to separate. Firmly set in the Park Slope of 1986, this New York story gains much of its humor and a surprising amount of pathos from the adolescent precociousness unique to city kids, as well as from Daniels, who manages to build a deep well of sympathy for his role as a cheap, snobbish megalomaniacal father. Funny, sad, and most of all clear-eyed in its insights about family dynamics, "Squid" is an unsentimental character study with intense affection for its subjects.

An unfortunate dearth of female voices in the dramatic competition is offset by Miranda July and Georgina Garcia Riedel, whose two films, "Me and You and Everyone We Know" and "How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer," boast more than just the two longest titles in this year’s festival. "Me and You," the first fiction feature from multimedia performance artist July, is a glimpse into a small-town neighborhood of lonely souls all looking for love and human connection. Peppering her sweet but somewhat too-precious comedy with disarmingly lewd sexual language (both written and spoken), July (who casts herself as a struggling video artist) shows a keen ear for charmingly skewed romantic situations and characters, as well as an occasional sense of visual poetry amid otherwise pedestrian direction and HD cinematography. And Reidel’s "Garcia Girls" is a badly paced and relatively simplistic intergenerational story of three women searching for a good man, somewhat competently acted but shot with a ravishing eye for widescreen mise-en-scene.

Cinematography has been uneven this year, with seven of the sixteen dramatic competition shot in varying qualities of HD video. The worst of the lot, visually and in every other sense of the word, is "Who Killed Cock Robin?," the first feature from acclaimed documentarian Travis Wilkerson. While his previous work, "An Injury to One," was an elegant, elegiac and infuriating ode to betrayed union workers, "Cock Robin" is simply a massive failure of dramatic storytelling, suffering from an underwritten story, politically obscure themes, poor digital cinematography, deadly dull sequences and amateurish acting. Its only redeeming quality are lyrical but too-brief Super-8 interludes and a soundtrack of mournful folk music that gives a weight to the feature that is otherwise undeserved.

Equally adrift in terms of its narrative but boasting some of the best use of digital cinematography at the festival is Robinson Devor’s "Police Beat," a string of apparently true crime situations strung together during the course of a week, while a Senegalese cop ruminates on his open-relationship girlfriend that comes off as a pretentious exercise in visceral episodic epiphanies.

Lastly, one of the better lensed features shot in HD is Junebug," Phil Morrison’s southern tale of a Chicago art gallery owner (Embeth Davidtz), married in whirlwind time to a North Carolina transplant, who meets the in-laws during an unexpected trip to visit a buzz-worthy folk artist. Marred by main characters whose motivations towards each other and their attitudes about family are never clearly or satisfyingly articulated, the film nonetheless unfolds with a poignant charm that is earned almost single-handedly by Amy Adams. Her extraordinary supporting turn an easily impressed, pregnant sister-in-law whose enthusiasm, relentless optimism and plucky goodwill nearly collapses towards the end, gives the film a redemptive heart and soul that will hopefully be remembered at this weekend’s awards ceremony.