Dale Dickey is The Leading Lady We’ve Been Waiting For in A Love Song

Everyone has one person where you just woke up one day and it’s as if they never existed leaving you yearning and longing for one more moment to make things right and move on.  But, what happens when you have moved on and married other people, only to discover of feelings lurking around in your emotional arsenal waiting to be freed.

Faye (Dale Dickey) is a lone traveler who bides her time fishing, birding and stargazing at a rural Colorado campground as she awaits the arrival of Lito (Wes Studi), a past young love who is navigating his own tentative and nomadic journey across the West.

Directed and written by Max Walker-Silverman, there is no mistaking that A Love Song is a love letter to middle-aged love and the unsung talents of Dale Dickey and Wes Studi.   Dickey owns every moment as Faye, a woman of few words.  However, when Faye does speak up, it is simple, to the point and powerful in one fell swoop.  As Lito, Studi portrays a man who is gentle, soft-spoken, yet still in an emotional time warp he can’t seem to escape.  Together, they experience  uncomfortable moments where you recall the past out of the awkwardness of acknowledging the present.  The most raw and real moment is when the pair sits down with guitars and croon verses of “Be Kind to Me,” written by Michael Hurley, toward one another with a familiar, easy energy that give you hope that they will ultimately reconnect.

This film has coupled two great American actors, each iconic and acclaimed in their own way, who have played a lifetime of characters who have been tough, villainous and/or warriors. Hollywood hasn’t allowed characters like these two to fall in love on screen, but trust me people are ready for it. They might even need it.

Walker-Silverman does an amazing job shooting mostly in the dark and in the desert where neither provide the most idyllic of circumstances to shoot.  As deeply emotional and engaging as the film is, the director was smart to break it up with a few random moments involving a car engine and some nearby ranchers and a LGBTQ couple on the verge of getting engaged even though one of them is ready to Runaway Bride it as her feet are icy cold at the prospect of commitment.

I love as Faye walks unassumingly through the desert brush, her image is engulfed with a sea of yellow flowers representing the hope for a new life and the musical score is quite perfect.  More than anything, as a fan of Dale Dickey and Wes Studi, it was more than wonderful to witness them as romantic leads while screaming to Hollywood  zeitgeist of green light gremlins that we need more stories with folks that look like a regular old people from around the way.

Produced by Bleecker Street, A Love Song has a select theatre  run starting July 29th.  Do yourselves a favor and check it out if for nothing else to fall back in love with yourself – the good, the bad and the ugly.