Of the roughly five movies shoehorned into Songcatcher, Maggie Greenwald's earnest and deeply conventional ode to turn-of-the-century Appalachia, four of them are mired in a thicket of "-isms": traditionalism, intellectualism, capitalism, feminism, and lesbianism. With little grace or nuance, Greenwald congratulates her audience by ladling safe, progressive modern values on a backwoods setting that buckles under the weight of such flimsy anachronisms. For a film primarily concerned with the "purity" of mountain music, the mere hint of anything inauthentic would seem deadly. But the central story—fortunately, the one of the five that works—redeems the frequently leaden melodrama with the simple beauty and plaintive emotion of traditional country songs, which Greenwald supplies in ample doses. Played with characteristic tenacity and grit by Janet McTeer (Tumbleweeds), the intrepid heroine, a musicologist at a small university, quits her job after she's repeatedly passed over for advancement by the all-male administration. Setting off into the mountains of North Carolina, she takes refuge at a quaint cottage and adjoining schoolhouse run by sister Jane Adams and E. Katherine Kerr, Adams' illicit companion. When McTeer hears local teenager Emmy Rossum sing the sad ballads she was taught as a child, McTeer is energized by their raw authenticity and travels further up the mountain to compile recordings for a songbook. But her quest meets resistance from Aidan Quinn, a brusque, hard-living redneck who is fiercely protective of the Appalachian way of life and senses an impending threat to its traditions. Predictably, Quinn and McTeer's playful skirmishes lead to a torrid romance, so the real threat comes in the form of stock villain David Patrick Kelly, a sleazy, coal-mining industrialist who scams landowners off their property for 50 cents an acre. With all these overstuffed subplots to manage, Greenwald is too busy to give the characters any shading or depth, and she cops out on the tension between tradition and progress by splitting the difference. In her version of Appalachia, the mountain folk can keep their land, their songs, and even their cute habit of greeting strangers with the barrel of a shotgun, so long as they're open to alternative lifestyles and academic inquiries. But for all its faults, Songcatcher's infectious passion for music is hard to dismiss; it showcases a rich selection of centuries-old Scotch-Irish songs performed by the likes of Emmylou Harris and Iris DeMent. At heart, McTeer's discoveries are transcendent, even if there's a lot of feeble material to transcend.