Humboldt County

A jaded, sweater-vested UCLA med student (Jeremy Strong), flunked out by his own father (Peter Bogdanovich), finds himself stranded among grungy pot farmers in the northernmost woods of Northern California. Think Garden State, but in a different state. A gently altered state. Writer-directors Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs get bogged down in dramatic cheese on occasion, but their attentive fondness for the landscape and its denizens (as represented by Brad Dourif, Frances Conroy, Chris Messina and, briefly, Fairuza Balk) is more than superficial. The film really wants to be more serious than its gimmicky concept, but needs to heed its own theme-underlining advice: “Don’t take it so seriously, man.” DVD special features include an amusing bit in which the filmmakers point out their own obscurity.