Since emerging as part of the early-'90s indie-film boom with Gas Food Lodging, a sharply realized character study drawing on her experiences as a single mother, Allison Anders' career has been dominated by her passions for rock 'n' roll and intensely personal filmmaking. Those two strands meet with frustratingly uneven results in Things Behind The Sun, a low-budget drama that uses the rock-world milieu of Anders' Grace Of My Heart and Sugar Town as the setting for a semi-autobiographical look at the devastating aftershocks of rape. Shot on digital video (and so ugly that the film could double as a propaganda piece about the dangers of digital filmmaking), Sun stars Kim Dickens as a Florida singer who attempts to bury her pain as a rape survivor under a cloud of booze, casual sex, and self-destructive behavior. Alerted that a Dickens song about rape is shooting up the college-rock charts, editor Gabriel Mann pushes his magazine to run a story about her, and when he insists that he knows who raped her—information unknown to the police—he's sent to get that story. When he arrives in Florida, it becomes clear that his involvement with Dickens and her decades-old rape goes well beyond curiosity and professional duty, and as Mann and Dickens fall into an uneasy flirtation, each is forced to wrestle with the event that defined them both. Clearly a labor of love for everyone involved, Things Behind The Sun nevertheless gets off to an awful start, hampered by ham-fisted exposition, clumsy dialogue, unsightly cinematography, and acting so stiff that the film begins to feel like a socially conscious Movie Of The Week hijacked by the Porn Film Players. Thankfully, Sun improves as it goes along, as Anders wisely shifts the focus to Dickens, whose mixture of childlike vulnerability and drunken bravado rivals Jennifer Jason Leigh's raw, electrifying performance in Georgia. Also on board is the terrific Don Cheadle, who invests the seemingly thankless role of Dickens' manager, protector, and long-suffering semi-boyfriend with pathos and gravity. Despite their best efforts, Sun never fully recovers from its excruciating beginning, although the fact that it rebounds at all is a testament to Anders' conviction and Dickens' remarkable lead performance.