As Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others have so graciously continued to help prove, AM talk radio provides a valuable service — distracting the nutty, impressionable and obsessed enough to (mostly) keep them from violently acting out. Big Fan tests that hypothesis, though.

A sort of indie throwback to low-fidelity 1970s cinema, as well as a companion piece to the obsessive thriller One Hour Photo, debut director Robert Siegel’s exactingly sketched character study also shares much in common with his breakthrough screenwriting effort of last year, The Wrestler. One lead character is more proactive and engaged, the other a hermetic loafer who lives vicariously through a religious devotion to his beloved New York Giants, but both films center on broken-down, scruffy guys searching for human connection.

Thirty-five-year-old football fanatic Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt) still lives at home in Staten Island with his mother, and spends his working hours as a parking garage attendant sketching out scripts for his sports talk radio calls, where he engages in long-distance wars of words with a Philadelphia Eagles fan (Michael Rapaport) he’s never met. Though he can’t afford season tickets, Paul nonetheless devotedly treks down to the stadium parking lot each weekend there’s a home game, tailgating and hanging around to watch the game on a TV hooked up to his car battery, as if somehow his mere proximity to the actual event will tip the scales in favor of his team. When Paul and his pal Sal (Kevin Corrigan, above center) get a glimpse of their favorite player (Jonathan Hamm) one night, they impulsively follow him back to Manhattan, then lurk nervously in the background for hours at a fancy strip club, trying to figure out a way to approach him. When they finally do — and let slip how long they’ve been following him — the situation becomes violent, and Paul is injured. Humiliated and, more pressingly, worried about the incident’s effect on his team, Paul becomes more and more irritable and isolated.

Comedian Oswalt gives a great, perhaps even career-altering performance, shading Paul’s embittered investment in only the things in life over which he has no control, and making him a sad-sack figure that’s not just some two-dimensional loser. It certainly helps that Siegel gets all the accompanying details right, from the assortment of plastic hangers in Paul’s closet and the fantasy magazines scattered across his nightstand to his hectoring mother and garish, surgically-enhanced, tan-in-a-can-sporting sister-in-law, who looks like a prime candidate for a spot on the next installment of VH-1’s Rock of Love. So when Paul puts on his football jersey and curls up on his bed, crying, you know his pain in a way that’s rooted in reality. You’ve laughed at him, and now you feel an awkward identification at the choking, claustrophobic introversion on display.

The quiet savvy of Big Fan‘s finale, and how it makes a stinging and yet insightful comment on the culture of obsessive fandom, lies in the manner in which Siegel deftly toys with thriller conventions. He’s enough of a movie fan to play off of audience expectation with the precision of a jujitsu master, and Big Fan benefits accordingly. (First Independent, 85 minutes, R)

Though it released in rolling fashion earlier in August, the gripping, emotionally devastating Sundance-minted documentary The Cove merits autumnal mention here because of the special timeliness of its narrative — the dolphin slaughter that it places under the microscope takes place annually in September.

Directed by National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos, The Cove tells the amazing true story of how Psihoyos, former Flipper trainer turned activist Richard O’Barry and an elite team of eco-warriors, filmmakers and free-divers embark on a covert mission to penetrate a tightly guarded fishing cove in Taiji, Japan. There, while being harassed by both local government officials and fishermen none too happy with the prospect of negative publicity, the Cove team shines a light on a dark and deadly secret that involves the capture and sale of thousands of dolphins, the annual slaughter of 23,000 more, the bureaucratic intrigue of industrial whaling international vote-trading, and mislabeled, mercury-spiked dolphin meat (beware, Jeremy Piven!) being packaged as part of compulsory Japanese elementary school lunches.

While it blends heartfelt reminiscences from O’Barry with a handful of interviews of people who will actually speak on camera, The Cove is, truth be told, mostly pieced together like a Steven Soderbergh heist flick, not some staid non-fiction film. Proving that some good actually came of the steaming pile of excrement that was Evan Almighty, the filmmakers tap one of that movie’s prop masters to help construct fake, hollowed-out rocks to house cameras. In clandestine fashion, the team then hides the cameras, along with underwater microphones, to capture the brutal carnage.

Psihoyos and editor Geoffrey Richman take a page from James Marsh’s Man on Wire, wringing drama from a foregrounded event; the bloody end result, even though you “know” what’s coming, packs more of a queasy punch than a dozen prefabricated Hollywood thrillers. The Cove is definitely, unapologetically subjective — a piece of social activist cinema all the way, complete with the call-to-action of David Bowie’s “Heroes” blasting over the end credits — but it’s also truly heartbreaking. You won’t feel good about feeling so wrapped up in the movie, sure to be short-listed for Academy Award documentary consideration, but you will feel. That much is certain. For more information, click here. (Roadside Attractions, 91 minutes, PG-13)