Skip a rock across the surface of a body of water - it will cause ripples in ever-expanding rings, defying gravity as it hops along for a split second before disappearing into the depths.

In The Delta, the rock is a confrontational Vietnamese immigrant named Minh (Thang Chan), the surface is 17-year-old dreamboat Lincoln (Shayne Gray) and the body of water is the mighty Mississippi (playing itself).

We first meet Lincoln Bloom as he indifferently trawls for gay sex along a buzzing Memphis side street. Dark-skinned Minh leans into the window and asks, "'Sup?" before they make out and Lincoln gives him a blowjob, shown (albeit off camera) for such a long time it borders on voyeurism. Except it isn't erotic, it simply is - and the entire film has this same cinema verite quality.

When they're done, Lincoln speeds away. He apparently puts the episode behind him even if Minh, we'll later discover, has put it front and center.
Lincoln is a unique figure in gay cinema. In a film like this, where one would expect to find an all-American BMOC tortured by his budding homosexuality, there is instead an affable, boyish, distracted guy who's more confounded than self-loathing. He neither fits in with the disenfranchised freaks milling on the outskirts of the cruising grounds nor with the cool drop-outs congregated in front of the convenience store he patronizes after sucking a stranger's dick - but he is clearly somehow still an outsider.

At a family dinner that observes more about race divisions in the South with a few lines than would seem possible, we learn that Lincoln is not held to an impossible standard by his barely-there family, unlike so many heroes of gay coming-out lit and film. He may be closeted in his same-sex desire, but a clandestine wank in the bathroom insinuates that his true secret is broader - like some romantics are in love with love, Lincoln privately lusts for passion.

Lincoln's mediocrity (at best) is further shown in a series of hang-out scenes that lurch with a nihilistic momentum anyone with small-town roots will recognize. His friends are a mix of shruggy whiners and kids with stifled potential, all bonding through cheap, universal distractions like beer, pot, music and Taco Bell.

A fight with his similarly uncentered girlfriend Monica (Rachel Zan Huss) begins with a harmless and typical lie and ends with her observing, "Sometimes you're so full of shit." With the unflinching acceptance of a true sub, Lincoln replies, "I know it." They could be discussing his sexual attraction to men, and in a subconscious way they probably are.

The tiff drives Lincoln back to his favorite pick-up spot. A scene depicting Lincoln sitting slouch-shouldered on the hood of his car as he is reeled in by a horny middle-aged man (Anthony Isbell) is brilliant in its economy, perfectly capturing the void of social niceties in this kind of situation.

When the man asks Lincoln back to his hotel, Lincoln's utter lack of an opinion on the matter is so profound the stranger has to instruct him on what to do next as if he's dealing with a toddler. He is nearly robotic in his obeisance, but when the encounter veers away from somnambulant sex into knowing artifice, Lincoln calmly removes himself from it. His thwarted trick's taste for daddy/boy role-playing is not too advanced for Lincoln, it is actually painfully old-fashioned, from a generation where sex roles were clear and therefore labels held a self-defining power.

Undeterred, Lincoln hits a porno palace, where he's spotted by Minh. If half the place would be too scared or self-conscious to approach a mark as adorable as Lincoln, Minh - who is after all 10 years older, not conventionally handsome and half-black/half-Vietnamese in Memphis, Tennessee - has balls to spare. "You so cute," Minh says. With characteristic and disorientingly thorough incomprehension, Lincoln's reply is, "I'm cute?" "You sexy." "Sexy?" It's as if he's considering the obvious for the first time - probably why he is still available to Minh at all.

Through sheer charisma, Minh talks his dimpled prey into a night drive, one that will take them to Lincoln's father's boat. With a wanderer's sense of the now that infects Lincoln, Minh successfully advocates a Huck-and-Jim voyage along the Mississippi that will temporarily remove the two from their everyday existences, even as it fails to rout them from their involuntarily entrenched positions in the social caste.

Lincoln and Minh have the improbable, palpable sexual chemistry borne of mutual need - one instinctively seeks release from his humdrum path in life and the other yearns for acceptance. It's not surprising that Minh has fallen in love with Lincoln at first sight - abandoned as a child by his G.I. father, taunted in his native land for the color of his skin, of course he would experience an overwhelming feeling when he wins the affection of a cute white guy in the land of plenty. Part of the problem is that Lincoln is a highly charged symbol to Minh, and his embryonic ego is incapable of realizing his importance as such. Lincoln is an attractively empty but ultimately - at least at this early stage of his life - bottomless vessel for Minh's hopes and dreams.

When Lincoln finally realizes Minh's passion is not the kind that arcs with an erection and fizzles with ejaculation, but the kind that sustains itself over time, threatening to supersede the safety of shadows, he suggests he needs to get back. "You already gone," Minh says, and it is the beginning of the end.

Their relationship is as intense and fleeting as the illegal fireworks the two set off at Minh's insistence. This harmless act of defiance will lead to their inevitable, melodramatic flare-out, which in turn leads to violence previously undetectable in either of the lovers.

The oceans (or oceanic rivers) that separate people are identified subtly and surely by director/writer Ira Sachs. There is the white household of Lincoln's family, the Vietnamese pool hall where Minh gets a humiliating lesson and the black bar and restaurant where the two of them escape on their abortive journey. These places could be in different solar systems they're so far removed from each other. Interestingly, when a black man asks Minh where he's from ("China?"), Minh says "Mars."

The production values of this short feature (85 minutes) may turn off some viewers - the sound in particular is a challenge intensified by Thang Chan's broken English and unusual enunciation. But the grainy night shots, stained with hazed-over city lights, impart a sensual nocturnal restlessness that actually suits the subject matter. The sense of place throbs in every shot, and the newness of this place in the geography of gay cinema is arresting.

The overall look and feel of The Delta is appropriately muddy, and it's hard to believe a million dollars more in the budget would have been an improvement. You can't buy ambience and you certainly can't budget in depth of feeling.

The use of non-pro actors pays off. Gray in particular leaves a lasting impression as the boy who gets away - from himself and all his pursuers. Chan's performance is less nuanced but still heart-breaking. The supporting players were all recruited from the area and none have made repeat appearances on film. It might be true that many can't act in general, but in this specific film they don't need to and they shore up The Delta's hypnotic credibility as surely as any thespians could have.

From its sultry opening shot of a shirtless man stalking a cruisy stretch of road, The Delta has a singular point of view and field of vision. There is almost nothing in the film that is expected, from the flow of dialogue to the trickle of events. This singularity makes for a film that will captivate some viewers with the suddenness of a flash flood, but might wash over others with an aversion to movies that lack a clear narrative or that echo with an eerie, perhaps arty, music-free stillness.

Even for enthusiastic viewers, the flawed tragic ending - which comes as unexpectedly for the audience as the act in question does for its hapless victim - is a deeply disturbing and perhaps perplexing denouement to a film that is otherwise a thrillingly storyless character study far removed from gimmicky gay moviemaking.

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Review by Matthew Rettenmund