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One of the most daring, and occasionally foolish, choices a screenwriter can make is to create a story whose extras have larger problems than its main character. Writer/director Zach Godshall and writer/actor Barlow Jacobs walk this risky path with their Sundance-selected feature, Low and Behold. Godshall and Jacobs actually amplify the gulf between Jacobs’ claims adjuster lead, Turner, and the film’s Katrina victims by grafting documentary interviews with real hurricane survivors into the fictional narrative.

What results is a sour mash distillation of one middle class white man’s encounter with an entire city in wreckage.

The extended instrumental passages that lilt over footage of abandoned homes and trailers—one tagged defiantly “I will be back”—serve to underscore the richness of Low and Behold’s found source material. Unfortunately they also hold the narrative thread to a standard of depth and transparency that cannot possibly be matched, no matter how remarkable David Gordon Green regular Eddie Rouse is as Nixon, the broken old soul who tags along with Jacobs’ dumbstruck Turner.

The other performances are uneven, but rarely dull. “I’m sorry there’s no music, and I’m sorry there’s no strobe light,” Robert Longstreet says as Turner’s misguided uncle, during his dismal going away party. He’s drunk and he’s depressed, but it’s one of the more honest and poignant moments Godshall gives us.

What did well to connect the fictional and nonfiction portions of the feature were the warm, haunting original score and the director’s keen eye. Godshall knows a pretty picture when he sees one, and he and cinematographer Daryn De Luco capture gorgeously heartbreaking portraits of Katrina-torn New Orleans without letting any perfectionists’ need for over-composed images sterilize the impromptu feel that much of this intriguing film leans on the ease.