Imaginary Crimes

Keitel is good but not stretched as Ray, a small man with big dreams, doomed both as a barely legit businessman and as a husband and father. His eldest daughter (Balk, good) is a bright high school kid and budding author, who uses the emotions he provokes as raw material for her stories about one girl's experience growing up in '60s Colorado. It's a rites-of-passage story in which the daughter's loss of innocence is compared and contrasted with the father's almost childlike destructiveness and delusion; his crimes, real or imaginary, provide the pain which she will use to shape her success. Drazan's careful direction certainly suits the heartfelt script (from a book by Sheila Ballantyne), but more than lashings of honest emotion is required.