The news that John Sayles was bringing his newest film to the Virginia Film Festival has been all that anybody has talked about in this town for weeks–a fact reflected in the line of laughing, gesturing, excited filmgoers that wound about a block-and-a-half down Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall before the show.

Sayles made a brief appearance before the movie with his longtime partner in producing and love, Maggie Renzi. And for middle-aged cineastes in the crowd like me–those who’d, in a manner of speaking grown up with this pair from Return of the Secaucus Seven to Brother from Another Planet to Matewan, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish and so many others–it was an “ahhh” moment.

Sayles lumbered over to the podium in a charcoal T-shirt–I’d had no idea he was so tall; he simply towered over everyone on the stage; even the hands that gripped the sides of the podium were enormous, expressive. Renzi wore dashing half-boots and something in bronze and black with a gypsy flair. John was a bit gray; they were both a bit thicker in the middle–but the affection between the two of them and their shared zest for the movie was palpable.

I just wish I shared it. Honeydripper ended up being, for me, toothache sweet. And a bit of a bore.

The movie is set in Harmony, Alabama, where the roads are dusty, and the sunlight dazzles on fields full of hip-high cotton. Danny Glover plays Tyrone “Pinetop” Purvis, a man haunted by a violent past who has a struggling blues club, a wide-eyed stepdaughter named China Doll (YaYa DaCosta), and a wife, Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who’s torn between her sanctified church and her loyalty to her man. There are great bits from Charles S. Dutton as a lovable sidekick, Davenia McFadden as a “woman with needs,” Stacy Keach as a corrupt sheriff, Keb’n Moore as a blind guitarman who may or may not really be there, Mary Steenburgen as an aging belle who can’t lay off the sherry…

(Caution: Spoilers looming.)

But it’s all straight out of the dusty trunk of Southern kitsch. Fifteen minutes into the movie I knew exactly what was going to happen and to whom. I knew the skinny kid with the homemade guitar (Gary Clark Jr.) was going to save the day. I spent another sixty waiting for the kid to bang out those first chords–and they seemed interminable.

Because nothing is really at stake. In Honeydrippers, armed deputies prowl the cotton fields glaring at the convict labor–but they exude all the menace of department store dummies. The men rounded up as vagrants enter the fields in white shirts and leave in white shirts. Nobody gets dirty and nobody sweats. In Alabama. During the cotton harvest. The crooked judge cheats the laborers and the sheriff blusters–but all he really wants is a piece of the action at the club and some of Pinetop’s wife’s fried chicken. A city boy and a country boy square off on the night of the big show, but the fight is over almost before it begins. The club is saved, everyone pairs off, the blind bluesman announces his work is done… And the credits roll. The end.

I go to a John Sayles movie for the sharp racial, political, and class observation that made movies like City of Hope and Lone Star gripping and essential viewing. Racial, political, and class observation are present in this movie, but they get drowned in a warm glow of sentiment, of nostalgia. This is a movie that is, after all, is set at a time of deep strife and injustice. But there’s so much honey dripped all over Sayles’s vision of the period that the contestation almost seems to justify the reconciliation–the heavy hand of the white South led to happy darkies jooking at the jook joint and the birth of rock n roll. Strange roots, but good fruit? Sorry, it just didn’t work for this viewer.

I think some folks will really like Honeydripper. It’s warm and sweet and kind of goofy–a fable of sorts and definitely an homage to a music and people the Sayles-Renzi team clearly adores. But I, for one, expect more from a John Sayles movie. And I was left … with a toothache.