The award-winning star of Winter’s Bone gets to share her first on-screen kiss — with Wes Studi — in Max Walker-Silverman’s low-key western romance.
After decades of attention-grabbing and highly praised supporting performances in movies and TV series ranging from Winter’s Bone (for which she won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female) and Hell or High Water to My Name is Earl and Justfied, Dale Dickey has finally landed a long-overdue and much-deserved leading role in A Love Song, the uniquely engaging and beautifully acted western romance written and directed by Max Walker-Silverman.
But wait: Dickey also gets to share her first on-screen kiss — with co-star Wes Studi — in the film, which opens this weekend in New York and Los Angeles before a nationwide rollout.
Dickey stars as Faye, a long-widowed woman of a certain age who bides her time at a remote Colorado campground while waiting to see if and when Lito (Studi), a friend from her childhood, will drop by for a visit after their being apart for many years. But when he finally does arrive, he and Faye approach each other warily, each uncertain of the other’s intentions, and their own.
While offering all due praise to Studi’s perfect-pitch performance, David Frear of Rolling Stone, echoing the sentiments of many other critics, wrote: “A Love Song is, first and foremost, a love letter to Dickey. A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, who might have walked straight out of a Walker Evans photo, she’s often been cast as tough matriarchs and economic fringe dwellers, with that beautiful face of hers too often used as an onscreen shorthand for hard times. Here, however, Dickey gets to play the scales, and prove that she’s as deft a soloist as she is a singer in the chorus. She’s in every scene, sometimes not saying a word, and yet you get all of Faye’s hesitations, hopes, self-sufficient leanings, loneliness, scars, and eventually, her sense of her place in a world she may have once shunned. One sideways glance from Dickey is worth a thousand what-if monologues. A morning greeting to an empty side of her bed plays like a six-word Hemingway short story. Watch her gently light up (and try to hide her joy) when Studi asks if he can take her picture. It’s the sort of performance that makes you stop taking great actors for granted. And while she’s nothing if not a team player, Dickey proves that she’s earned this center-stage turn.”
We recently spoke with Dale Dickey about A Love Song — and Wes Studi — in the C&I Studio.