This Is Not a War Story

A powerfully authentic portrait of veterans who shred their uniforms to make art, this "hybrid narrative" film probably would have found its highest calling as a documentary.

Authenticity is one of the hardest things to achieve in a movie. Filmmaking is the art of lies, often nobles ones, sometimes not — fiction made up in order to impart a higher truth and all that. Audiences can spot a story that is authentic instinctively, just as they can instantly know when they are being fed a trough full of Hollywood flimflam.

“This Is Not a War Story” absolutely thrums with an authentic vitality you don’t often see. Shot over several years on virtually no budget, it follows a group of military veterans who make art as a way to deal with the guilt, pain and alienation they feel upon returning to normal society. In their case, they tear up old military uniforms — their own and donated ones — pulverize them down into a pulp, which they turn into paper or canvas upon which they scrawl poetry, painting, confessions, journals… anything that helps express their hurt.

It stars, was directed by and written by Talia Lugacy, who has made just her third film in the last two decades. The first two both starred Rosario Dawson, who serves here as an executive producer. Lugacy plays Isabelle, a Marine MP who has recently mustered out and is completely lost. She wanders into the paper-maker group, finds a community that she can relate to, and slowly comes around to the idea that her life has value.

The other veterans are mostly played by the real-life vet/artists as themselves — Jan Barry, Nathan Lewis, Kevin Basl, Eli Wright, Walt Nygard among them. The studio we see them working in and the art they speak or show are the real thing. Even the most brilliant and inventive Hollywood storytteller could never come up with words and expressions so full of the weight of these men’s authentic lives. Their performances are so absolutely perfect because they are not acting.

I’m reminded of the opening minutes of “Up in the Air,” in which Jason Reitman introduced us to real people telling the real stories of them losing their jobs and their dignity. I remember one guy in particular asking how he was supposed to tell his kids. If it’s possible to win an Academy Award for a single minute of screen time, I thought, this guy deserves it. Some of the veterans in “War Story” belong in the same category.

Must of the movie is simply organic conversation, the men and Isabelle (the only woman in the group) sitting around, snipping up uniforms, putting them through big machines, painstakingly drying the pulp into paper, etc. All the while they talk about their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam or wherever they served. Their pain, their resentment, their determination not to succumb are a palpable presence, as tactile and real as the paper art they’re making.

If this was the whole of the movie, a documentary about their art-making group, I would be calling it extraordinary. But this self-described “hybrid narrative” film is determined to lay a fictional story right in the middle of this reality. It involves Isabelle becoming emotionally attached to Sam, another vet played very well by Sam Adegoke. Will has been acting as a peer counselor to other vets, and was shaken to his core by the death a month earlier of Timothy (Danny Ramirez), who simply rode around on the subway, popping pills until he passed out.

Will is a loner who hangs out all night, never sleeping, listening to radical political talk radio or podcasts. He has literature about insurgencies and coups lying around his place, and we worry about him.

The relationship between Isabelle and Will is intriguing… for awhile. She clearly wants something out of him — acknowledgement, affection, camaraderie, she may not even know herself. He clearly does not have it in him to give. But he recognizes a fellow lost soul and his protective instincts kick in, allowing her to follow him around and say and do whatever she needs to. This extends even when she makes a surprise visit to his family’s trailer home in the woods, invading his head space.

It’s around here that “War Story” wanders too far from its core. This is not a movie about two people finding each other and healing each other’s wounds. So we become increasingly distracted as that’s where Lugacy wants to push the story. I’m not even sure the word “story” is applicable to this film. It’s more like a rotating series of conversations and encounters, with the through line being the experiences of these warriors who feel betrayed by their own country.

There is anger steeped into the essence of this film. It’s powerful, it’s raw, and even if you don’t agree with the sentiments of how it’s expressed, it’s impossible to deny these people have earned the right to say what they will. A common theme is these soldiers were involved in the detention or interrogation of prisoners, a stain that clings to their souls.

Isabelle, who always wears the same tank-top shirt, dungarees and combat boots — the new uniform to replace her old — wants to die, and is just searching for a reason, any reason, to live. Her relationship with her bartender brother is strained, in part by their invalid mother (Frances Fisher, who gets one scene but a meaty one) who refuses to let her visit, or truly see her when she finally does.

There are two terrific things going on in “This Is Not a War Story,” the tale of a soldier who wants her pain acknowledged, and of veterans like her who have found an outlet for their spiritual wounds in turning the vestiges of their service into a physical object that can coalesce their pain. I just don’t know that they belong alongside each other in the same movie.

Still, this is a cinematic experience unlike any other we’ve seen on screen — it even angrily spits upon the legacy of Oscar-winning military films, calling them rah-rah BS. There is truth inside the rage.