On Broadway At the Independent Film Festival of Boston

If you're looking to be touched, warmed and uplifted by a movie these days, don't go to the multiplex. You know this already, of course. Instead, make sure you live in a city where they host a film festival, where you might run into something as special as Dave McLaughlin's On Broadway, which premiered this weekend at the Independent Film Festival of Boston.

It's the story of blue-collar Jack O'Toole (played by, yes, that Joseph McIntyre), who loses a beloved uncle in a freak work accident. Jack can't sleep the night after the wake, and decides he needs to write a play to capture the whirlwind of emotions the death brought out in his family.

He faces resistance; his friends think he's a goof, his wife (played by Jill Flint) worries about the bills, and his taciturn father (Sean Lawlor) thinks Jack should shut up and get back to work. Even when things start rolling, there's trouble, too. The pub where the show will be staged keeps overbooking and chasing out their rehearsals. The itinerant actor playing the lead can't be bothered to remember his lines. And, of course, there's no money.

This is all played out with such heart and depth by the cast that you're with Jack 100% right from the beginning. There are a couple of star turns, too. Watertown's Eliza Dushku plays Lena, an actress/insider who fortutiously runs into Jack at the pub, and the reigning First Couple of Comedy (Will Arnett and Amy Poehler) pop in for some memorable moments. (Arnett as a starstruck funeral director is especially brilliant.)

There was a Q+A after the screening in which McLaughlin and some of the cast and crew said they were proud and honored to make a movie about Boston that doesn't rely on gangsters and murderers. And this movie is so undeniably Boston that the pride bursts through. Jack's buddy Neil (T conductor by day, amateur actor by night) takes Lena on a date in the cockpit of a Red Line train. The pub (the Skellig in Waltham) looks just like the Irish pub in everyone's neighborhood. And the soundtrack is heavy on local artists with Exploit Boston Radio's stamp of approval, including The Bleedin Bleedins and Buffalo Tom's Bill Janovitz.

McLaughlin is still trying to get On Broadway into other festivals and into some kind of wide release. Here's hoping he's successful; this movie deserves an audience.