John Cassavetes died in 1989, but his spirit lives on in countless low-budget cinematic underdogs about hard-drinking, hard-living lowlifes fighting, fussing, and philosophizing their way through bleak existences, and periodically erupting into fits of actor-friendly histrionics. It's easy to see why filmmakers attempt to emulate Cassavetes' gutter romanticism, but the actor-director's influence tends to inspire a grating mixture of over-the-top melodrama and mawkish sentiment. Similarly, the digital-video revolution has opened the floodgates to filmmakers whose ambitions far outweigh both their budgets and talents. These two phenomena meet in Virgil Bliss, a micro-budgeted digital-video drama which writer/director/producer John Maggio dedicated to Cassavetes and fellow miserablists Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Maggio's film gets off to an awful start, serving as a frightening reminder that while digital video has made filmmaking easier, its often-atrocious visual quality makes good filmmaking even harder. Virgil improves dramatically as it proceeds, however, thanks in large part to Clint Jordan, who turns in a powerful performance as the ironically named title character, a petty criminal who has survived numerous stints in the big house with both his virginity and his civility intact. Paroled early and sent to a halfway house, he instantly falls in love with drug-addled hooker Kirsten Russell, who is too immersed in self-hatred to view Jordan's earnest advances with anything but suspicion bordering on contempt. At first, his schoolboy crush feels like an unrealistic writerly conceit. But Jordan's dogged persistence cracks Russell's brittle façade, and his quietly intense performance makes his focus on the straight and narrow seem not only plausible, but touching and noble. Films like Virgil Bliss exist for the sake of their lead performances, and on that level, the film is an unqualified success: Jordan is a marvel of controlled rage, while Russell excels in revealing the tiny cracks beneath her character's belligerent surface. In the film's best scene, a solitary Russell tries on Jordan's shirt and does a simultaneously mocking and affectionate impersonation of him that reveals just how deeply he's gotten under her skin. But just as their poignant performances and low-key chemistry seem on the verge of redeeming the film, it spins off into a ridiculously overheated climax involving Russell's cartoonish pimp and an equally far-fetched heist. First-time director Maggio has two enormous assets in his lead actors. It's just a shame that he betrays them with a silly ending that does much to diminish their efforts.