Review: A micro-indie with a huge heart, 'Burt' tells a slender, stirring story of belated connection

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You often hear that short stories make the best movies, as if the notion is to take something compact and widen it with cinema’s scalability.But the reverse can also be true: Certain movies benefit from feeling pocket-sized and unfettered, as if you’ve curled up with a tight, evocative short story, filled with just enough humor, detail and feeling to evoke a warm glow.Set over two days during the instant relationship between a desperate young man from New York and a lonely older Los Angeles street musician, the black-and-white micro-indie “Burt” from director and co-screenwriter Joe Burke is one such half-slice of heart and calories, neither too much nor undercooked.

You could watch a lot of films made with its equivalent budget (think that of a used 2007 sedan) and sense an ambition straining against constraints or a deliberate attempt at slumming.Not so with “Burt,” the movie equivalent of a cherry sour drop on a day when you need something a little tart, a tad sweet and that won’t outstay its welcome.“Burt” stars Burt Berger as, well, Burt Berger, a 69-year-old troubadour type whom we first see in a sparsely attended coffeehouse plucking away at his guitar and, as if the ’60s never went away, singing about freedom.

(Via Berger’s earnest, aged voice, the concept sounds hard-won.) Watching him intently is Sammy (co-screenwriter Oliver Cooper), who asks for a moment of Burt’s time.Over a picnic table in a field, this kind-eyed, spindly musician, visibly dealing with Parkinson’s, is informed that Sammy is the son he never knew he had.

To which you might think: Finally, a movie that doesn’t waste time getting straight to what we’re already thinking.Movies Director Joe Burke and longtime collaborator Oliver Cooper make microbudget indies.

Their new one, ‘Burt,’ doesn’t have a distributor yet, just tons of heart.Burt is tickled by the news and v...