Maturing but still messy, a mumblecore kid returns to South by Southwest a veteran

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AUSTIN, Texas — “The Sun Never Sets” is filmmaker Joe Swanberg’s 10th indie to premiere at SXSW but his first to play the event since 2017.The astonishing pace with which he made his early work — loose, idiosyncratic stories that were progenitors of the emergent style known as mumblecore — has slowed significantly, but also given way to a newfound maturity as both a person and an artist.Introducing “The Sun Never Sets” at its world premiere on Friday night to a sold-out crowd at the Zach Theater, Swanberg called his latest “my favorite film I’ve ever made.” Shot on 35mm in Anchorage, the movie follows a 30-ish woman, Wendy (Dakota Fanning in a vibrant turn), torn between pursuing a fresh romance with a reckless old flame (Cory Michael Smith) or continuing on with the settled-in-his-ways divorced father of two (Jake Johnson) she’s been seeing for a few years.“I guess this is what they tell you about getting older and doing this job longer,” said a thoughtful Swanberg in a video interview from his home in Chicago shortly before the South by Southwest festival.

“You get better at it and you sort of mature and all of this.”The film marks Swanberg’s fourth collaboration with Johnson, a partnership that goes back to 2013’s “Drinking Buddies.” (The actor partly financed the new project along with his brother.) Following completion of the third season of the Netflix anthology series “Easy” in 2019, for which he wrote and directed all the episodes, Swanberg was planning to take a break.A divorce and the pandemic caused that pause to grow even longer.

Movies This year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival will showcase new films starring Keke Palmer, Elle Fanning, Nick Offerman, Hannah Einbinder, Lola Tung and more.In the intervening years Swanberg produced a number of projects for other filmmakers, did some acting and opened a small video store in ...