MOVIE REVIEW : SAFE NEIGHBORHOOD FOR DREAMERS IN ‘ECHO PARK’

How do the young and struggling live today on the fringes of Hollywood and on the cusp of their big break? As “Echo Park” would have it, pretty much the way we did in the (pre-Manson) ‘60s, with a sweetness, openness and seeming immunity to the world’s dark side (UA Coronet, Westwood).

Director Robert Dornhelm (“She Dances Alone”) has made a warming, small film, a humane and buoyant look at the friendship of three very different people, each lured to Hollywood equipped with not much more than faith and apparently inexhaustible optimism. In a way, the film, whose script is by L.A. Weekly critic/screen-writer Michael Ventura, is as endearing as its characters; you make allowances in a few technical areas because of its actors and its inherent charm.

The three live in a white Echo Park Victorian, whose peeling paint and sagging stoop are more than made up for by its splendid turrets and rounded shingles. May (Susan Dey) is at the apex of the film’s triangle; a sloe-eyed, would-be actress, currently majoring in mothering (8-year-old Henry, played by Christopher Walker) and bartending--to make ends meet.

Her upstairs neighbor, one thin partition away, is blond, ponytailed August Reizenstein (Michael Bowen, with an impeccable accent), come here like his countryman Arnold Schwarzenegger in search of the gold at the end of the barbell. August is no savvy Schwarzenegger, however. His dippy scheme involves capturing “star energy” somehow extracted from exercising superstars and transferring that to the muscles of mere would-be stars.

Jonathan (Tom Hulse), the watchful catalyst of the group, is currently delivering pizzas when he isn’t noodling around, putting music to his poetry. He’s bowled over by May, whose roommate he becomes, but she’s more interested in the bulging, ah, er, muscles of the exuberant August.

Dornhelm and Ventura’s squint at the more bizarre fringes of life in Los Angeles is certainly benign. When May (who seems not to believe in acting classes or little theater roles) finally gets what she takes as a break, it’s to be a “strippergram”--bringing the warmest messages in the fewest clothes possible to lucky birthday boys. (One of “Echo Park’s” best secondary characters is Hugo, the head of Strippergrams Inc. and no slouch at demonstrating the art, even in a suit and tie. He’s played deliciously by an actor named John Paragon who is just that, and a performer to watch for.)

Although May’s work appalls the level-headed Jonathan, after a few initial qualms she’s able to steel herself to the job, and even, we see in a quick montage of her costumes and characterizations, get pretty good at it.

But since the film-maker’s tone is light and semi-comic, the unsavory is downplayed, until it suits their purposes as a plot point. Their attitude seems either terminally naive or a throwback to a much more innocent era.

With such lovely performances by the genuinely affecting Dey, Hulce and Bowen, the script’s failure to develop their characters more fully feels especially negligent. And in an effort to wrap everything up there’s a melodramatically staged chase through the seedier side of the city--a side effect of May’s job--that feels off the point.

The rest of “Echo Park” hasn’t been about a struggling young mother and her relationship to her son; it’s about the pulls of friendship and/or love among three adults burdened with some pretty screwy illusions.

Yet even when the film gets off its own track, even in the moments when its modest budget is excruciatingly plain (in August’s dragon-slaying commercial or the Austrian counsel’s reception) or when its observations aren’t keen enough by far, “Echo Park” (R-rated for nudity, language) can still hook you.

Watching an impromptu moving-in hot dog roast on the front-porch steps as the sky turns turquoise and then starry, we feel a generosity and a warmth from this cheerful little extended family that includes us all in its glow.