Stephen Earnhart’s documentary is about a backwater Ed Wood: Mayport (Florida) resident Beanie Andrew, who refused to let a shoestring budget, alcoholic actors, and a cavalcade of trailer-park mishaps stop him from making his horror epic. Andrews is a fiftysomething good ol’ boy who, since the shrimping business dried up, occupies his time playing country music and bullshitting with Buccaneer Trailer Park’s finest. But he is not a man without direction. He enlists the musical duo of Steve Walker and Ricky Lix and the screenwriting talents of horror fanatic/janitor Larry Parrot to make his dream come true: the image of a gorilla stomping around a muddy junkyard in search of his arm.

Mule Skinner Blues is reminiscent of Chris Smith’s American Movie, another small-town adventure in filmmaking that plays off our urbanite "I Can’t Believe People Live like That" image of rural America. From Miss Jeanie (who yodels about the "DUI Blues") to costumer Annabelle Lea (who keeps her dead pit bull in a freezer) and Walker’s Vietnam flashbacks, this is a crew of characters few screenwriters could invent. Earnhart stylizes their lives without exploiting them, in a documentary that’s funny, pathetic, and ultimately about redemption.