Mendelsohn delivers star turn in 'Mississippi Grind'

Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn play a couple of lovable losers in "Mississippi Grind," but in the eyes of the film's directing team, they're born winners.

Anna Boden and her fellow writer/director Ryan Fleck have brought a signature brand of humanism and compassion to their projects since their debut in 2006, when they introduced a little-known actor named Ryan Gosling to the world in the riveting character study "Half Nelson." With "Mississippi Grind," the duo once again evinces a gift for eliciting sharply detailed performances.

As a gambling addict named Gerry, the Australian Mendelsohn delivers a career-making turn, submerging both his accent and his previous tough, even violent, personae to channel a sad sack with his eye on the main chance, even when he's drowning in debt and self-deception.

Gerry is circling the financial and existential drain when he meets Curtis (Reynolds) at a tense poker game at an Iowa casino. Handsome, affable and as addicted to charming every stranger he meets as Gerry is to betting on everything that moves, Curtis is the happy-go-lucky bon vivant to Gerry's crouching, hollow-eyed "grinder," as habitual gamblers are known.

The two make an unlikely but irresistible pair, and when Curtis mentions a high-stakes game down in New Orleans that the two might join, the curious, slightly seedy, road trip along the Mississippi is afoot.

Gerry's motivation for the junket is clear: He needs the dough to pay off his understanding but tough bookie, played in a potent cameo by Alfre Woodard. Curtis' reasons are far more opaque.

Is he genuinely out for Gerry's best interests, or is he embarking on an elaborate con? ("I don't deserve you, but you appeared," Gerry says wonderingly to Curtis at one point, "like a big, handsome leprechaun.")

The dynamics only grow murkier when the duo stops off in St. Louis, where Curtis finds his on-again-off-again girlfriend (Sienna Miller), and embarks on a tentative friendship with one of her proteges, a shy aspiring magician played by Analeigh Tipton.

Boden and Fleck reportedly got the idea for "Mississippi Grind" in 2007, when they were filming the wonderful baseball drama "Sugar," much of which transpired in a small Iowa town.

The Brooklyn-based team clearly harbors an affection for the Midwest, which they portray with a level-eyed lack of sentimentality, but also with a welcome absence of condescension.

They accord the same respect to the casinos, motels, dive bars and vagrant card games that Curtis and Gerry visit through the lower grain belt to the Delta South, a journey documented by a few straightforward shots of the sights (Sun Records, Commander's Palace), followed by plunges into the grim, airless world that their protagonists move through with practiced watchfulness.

(The grungily spot-on atmosphere of "Mississippi Grind" is echoed in the film's tasty, blues-dominated soundtrack.)

Like many compulsive gamblers, Curtis and Gerry are incurable optimists, their chase of the last big score propelled by superstition and the heady fumes of dreams that are just out of reach.

Despite occasionally slack plotting and one or two manipulatively obvious touches, the great strength of "Mississippi Grind" is that Boden and Fleck never see fit to tip their own hand on whether magical thinking is a gift or a sin.

They may not indulge Curtis and Gerry's irrationality, but neither do they judge it, just as they never romanticize the generic, utterly banal environment in which they make (or lose) their dubious living.

"Mississippi Grind" winds up being an improbably satisfying, even heartwarming character study.

Neither morality tale nor decadent road picture, it's an unlikely bromance between two Peter Pans who, when faced with the choice of whether to stay safely on terra firma, can't help but take flight.

Even if it means they'll crash and burn.

“Mississippi Grind”

★ ★ ½

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Ben Mendelsohn, Sienna Miller, Alfre Woodard

Directed by: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck

Other: An A24 Films release. Rated R for language. 108 minutes