Entering the world of graffiti artists

“Quality of Life,” the feature debut of director and co-writer Benjamin Morgan, takes as its milieu the world of underground graffiti artists in San Francisco. This is action painting in the most literal sense of the term, as their mode of creative expression requires jumping fences, shimmying over walls, fighting off other artists for wall space and running from the cops.

After two graffiti artists are arrested while practicing their craft (something of an off-night at the atelier) and subsequently sentenced to perform community service and pay restitution, these two inseparable buddies begin to follow different paths. One (Lane Garrison) attempts to make inroads in the straight world by focusing his talents on commercial art, while the other (co-writer Brian Burnam) spirals further into an outlaw lifestyle of drugs, fighting and reckless disregard for those around him.

Morgan is on sure footing when he is portraying the surprisingly graceful and hypnotic act of creating graffiti art, capturing the muscular buzz of swinging arms and hissing cans punctuated by moments of contemplation, as well as the insouciant camaraderie among its practitioners, but he is less in control when the film veers toward the dramatic. The art-versus-commerce, selling-out or buying-in debate is an eternal one, and though constantly open to new nuances and angles, the film finds little original to add to the perennial youth dilemma.

Although the filmmakers have succeeded in portraying a raw slice of street culture, they have also made something that seems unnecessarily stiff, foisting a structural conceit onto something that by its very nature is free-form and uncontainable.

The ending, which unnecessarily veers toward lumpy, overwrought melodrama, undoes the scrappy elegance the film previously displays in fits and starts.

*

‘Quality of Life’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Director Benjamin Morgan. Screenplay Brian Burnam, Morgan. Story Morgan, Burnam, Brant Smith, Tom Mullowney, Clay Butler & Aron Coleite. Director of photography Kev Robertson. Editor Sharon Franklin. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

Exclusively at Laemmle’s Fairfax Cinemas, 7907 Beverly Blvd. [at Fairfax Avenue], (323) 655-4010.