Back in the '50s and '60s, while independent producers cranked out horror cheapies to tour the lower halves of drive-in marquees, religious organizations put their money into earnest morality plays that screened after pot-luck suppers across the country. Out of that tradition comes God's Army, a Mormon-produced, Mormon-focused melodrama that slowly traveled through the U.S., becoming a modest grassroots success. Richard Dutcher writes, directs, and stars as the wizened middle-aged leader of a cadre of young men serving a "mission year" in Los Angeles. The central missionary is fresh-faced questioner Matthew Brown, who comes from Kansas trailing a cloud of family troubles. Brown and Dutcher are partnered to knock on doors and win converts to the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints, but shaky faith threatens their effectiveness as witnesses. God's Army has the shape and tone of a TV drama; Dutcher introduces a series of doubters, believers, and souls in crisis, and he amps up the bathos with a last-act miracle and a tear-jerking bout of cancer. But, to his credit, the film doesn't have the slick, look-how-mainstream-we-can-be style that hampers most overtly evangelical art. Instead, it's a quiet, well-acted film, full of attractive, well-meaning youngsters and conveying the camaraderie that comes when people fall to their knees together. And, man, is it ever Mormon-y. Fundamentalists looking for a family-friendly tale of faith may not know what to make of Dutcher's proselytizing on the merits of posthumous marriage and the untold tales of Jesus' journeys to the Americas. That distinctive religious conviction is what gives the film its edge—if it were in Farsi, God's Army might be a cause célèbre among cineastes with a taste for the exotic—but the Mormon-centricity is also what keeps it from being truly rewarding. Dutcher introduces valid questions about contradictions in Mormon texts, and about the church's tendencies toward racism and sexism, and while he's willing to leave the dilemmas of several characters refreshingly unresolved, he stops just short of suggesting that these pious kids in starched shirts and ties might have flaws beyond bad moods and a yen for dumb practical jokes.