Solid acting and filmmaking technique breathe a good bit of life into triple-hyphenate Blake Robbins’ The Sublime and Beautiful, a Slamdance Film Festival world premiere and narrative feature competition title. But there’s ultimately not enough of distinguished merit to save the movie from a screenplay that trades in rote, plodding dramatic developments and say-nothing symbolism. While not without a couple moments of nicely observed quiet heartache, too much of this impressionistic tale of survivor’s guilt — built around a drunk driving accident that robs a small town couple of their three children — is balanced alongside meandering story beats that resonate as vague, indistinct, phony or some combination thereof. The result — a work of enervated, representational moping — is an enormously frustrating viewing experience. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Vitamin A Films/Through a Glass Productions, unrated, 93 minutes)

An engaging documentary about the transformative power of the sort of teacher who is able to connect with and inspire teenagers, If You Build It illustrates the benefits of the practical application of alternative education, and the ripple effects that it can often create for a community — if and when that community is ready to embrace it. Telling the story of a pair of architectural designer-activists who alight upon a rural burgh with dwindling economic opportunity, the film is a bittersweet exploration of outreach and advocacy.

Directed by Patrick Creadon, If You Build It unfolds in the small town of Windsor, North Carolina. Idealistic partners in both business and life, college-educated architects Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller arrive with a different sort of curriculum. Their two-semester, off-site high school class is called Studio H — so named for “humanity, habitats, happiness and health” — and it involves the creative planning, refinement and construction of a number of projects for a small group of students, about 10 in number. First they’ll make “cornhole” (also known as beanbag toss) boards, then chicken coops. Their third project — with $150,000 in grants covering equipment and supplies — is a yet-to-be-determined structure for the community, which ends up being a farmer’s market pavilion.

In its passionate subjects, If You Build It would have enough to easily appeal to sympathetic viewers who fall hard for inspirational tales, and especially those involving adolescents. But Creadon, the director of Wordplay and I.O.U.S.A., is a gifted filmmaker with an intuitive understanding of how to complement and bolster his main narrative arc with compelling details, as he does here with an interwoven revelation about lessons learned by Miller from his post-graduate thesis work in Detroit.

Perhaps surprisingly, while interviews with the students at various points over the course of more than a year greatly inform the movie, If You Build It doesn’t delve into the home lives of its subjects in the way that recent Medora did, for instance. That film, about a hapless small town Indiana high school basketball team trying to secure their first victory in more than a year, was much more a metaphorical exploration of the wheezing death rattle of trickle-down economics. If You Build It, which could easily chart a similar course, largely eschews this tack. It’s a choice, but for the most part it works fine for this film.

Things break down a bit in the last third, though. The film paints a picture of a school board that is change-resistant or possibly worse. We see an abandoned elementary school, renovated two years prior to being closed down, and when the county superintendent, a supported of Miller and Pilloton, is fired, the intimation is that his prescriptions for change were somehow too radical. (The pair subsequently each forfeit their $40,000 salaries in their entirety, to keep the class afloat). Creadon doesn’t dig down into the politics of the school board, however, and how widely or deeply their efforts might be supported.

Early on, this is perhaps for the best; If You Build It, after all, is more interested in the elemental bond forged between high school kids and the type of instructor who is willing to move beyond the drill sergeant oversight of rote memorization of facts and embrace the role of mentor. Too much time spent in the weeds, as it were, would be time wasted, and take away from that focus. But in the home stretch, as deadlines loom and Pilloton and Miller’s future in the town becomes a topic of debate, these unaddressed subplots and sidebars seem conspicuous in their absence.

Overall, though, Creadon’s film touches a viewer’s heart because of the manner in which it so roundly showcases the reality that kids aren’t blind to the social rot around them. They crave answers and self-betterment and the opportunity for stability and upward mobility, just like adults. There’s a forlorn quality to If You Build It, but in its small, to-scale triumph there is also a glimpse — and a hope, really — of seeds planted for even greater future change. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Long Shot Factory, unrated, 86 minutes)

Maybe it’s my fault, really. Perhaps I should have watched The Grounded, Alaskan wildlife filmmaker Steve Kroschel’s documentary about the purported healing powers of simple physical, bare-skin contact with the Earth, on a laptop outdoors, on my back, shirtless, and with my feet dug into the soil. Maybe that would have made it make sense. Unfortunately I did not, and so the aims and claims of this rambling nonfiction effort — the filmic equivalent of the jittery, well-meaning neighbor on whom you can’t quite get a read — remain so hazy as to circumvent embrace from even the most sympathetic and open-minded viewers.

The Grounded is at least nominally a first-person, crusading affair, albeit one with all sorts of blurred lines and focus. Kroschel lives in Haines, a small, snow-swept town of 1,700, and after seeing or hearing some random New Age-y news report, he crawls underneath his house in sub-freezing temperatures, strips naked and lies down in the dirt (a sequence he recreates for the movie). The next morning, he’s free from all joint stiffness and pain. The Earth, a “source of free electrons,” has healed him of pain.

Deeming this “an undeniable phenomenon,” Kroschel then conducts some experiments with plants (“Guess which lily kept its petals the longest?”), and bounds into advocacy like an eager puppy. Why isn’t this natural treatment more widely known, he wonders. The Grounded does include some interview chats with figures of repute (Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and Canadian science broadcaster Dr. David Suzuki), but it mostly indulges an array of figures of dubious qualification or achievement, plus unexplained trips to Stonehenge, and a sequence where Kroschel lets his teenage son and his ill-equipped girlfriend interrogate a physicist. When he’s not tossing off important-sounding yet inescapably vague proclamations (“Gothic cathedrals often times were built exactly on energy hot spots”), Kroschel is busy passing out brown paper bags full of mysterious “grounding materials” to the townspeople of Haines, who later sing the praises of this treatment in curing arthritis, chronic back pain, torn rotator cuffs and more.

Ignoring the fairly questionable scientific method on display, Kroschel’s film mainly just has a hard time explaining or focusing on anything for more than two or three minutes. Some time is given to scientific pushback, but there’s just nothing of much intellectual substance on either side of any debate that might be had about homeopathic electron therapy and its effect on human physiology; The Grounded is an emotional work whose passion is outstripped by its incoherence. For more information on the movie, which opens this Friday in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, click here to visit its website. (Kroschel Films/One Paw Productions, unrated, 74 minutes)