Producers: Cameron Burns, Aaron B. Koontz, Marc Senter and Ashleigh Snead   Director: Lucky McKee   Screenplay: Joel Veach   Cast: Stephen Lang, Marc Senter, Patch Darragh and Liana Wright-Mark   Distributor: RLJE Films

Grade: C-

Now seventy, Stephen Lang has enjoyed a long and varied career on film, stage and television, but has never become a household name.  Younger viewers will recognize him as the blind man in the “Don’t Breathe” movies, and as the evil security chief in “Avatar,” a role he’s repeating in the upcoming sequels.  Others may remember him for his performance as General Stonewall Jackson in the monumental (if bloated) “Gods and Generals.”

In “Old Man,” Lang gets what’s mostly eluded him in the past—the lead role, and indeed one that dominates what’s essentially a two-character piece.  And he proves more than capable of holding your attention for ninety minutes or so, from first frame to last.  But that’s due more to his ability to inhabit an eccentric character than to the material provided him by scripter Joel Veach.

Lang’s old man is a curmudgeon inhabiting a remote cabin in the Smoky Mountains.  First seen sprawled in bed wearing red long johns, he suddenly awakens and calls out to his dog Rascal, who’s apparently run off.  He rages at the missing canine until there’s a knock at the door, which he answers only after grabbing his shotgun.  Throwing the door open, he finds Joe (Marc Senter), a frightened young man who claims to have gotten lost hiking and spied the smoke from the cabin’s chimney; he’s looking for help.

The old man is hardly welcoming, suspecting that the stranger, though soft-spoken and well-mannered, might be a psycho killer—or somebody sent by his wife to find him.  He alternately threatens and ridicules him, but the two warily reach an understanding, though one darkened by the old man’s penchant for telling stories like one about how he tortured a Bible salesman (Patch Darragh) who’d knocked at his door.  Joe is understandably concerned that the man might have similar plans of him.

At the same time, the old man’s suspicions about Joe aren’t unjustified.  The interloper isn’t merely nervous.  He’s holding things back, only revealing his past in bits and pieces.  Or perhaps he only remembers in bits and pieces.

Lang plays this out with an intensity that can shift from menace to rustic amiability with no problem, and Senter’s stiffness and hesitancy fit Joe’s predicament.  The single set—rather like a cluttered stage scene—has been contrived skillfully by production designer Lili Teplan, and director Lucky McKee, cinematographer Alex Vendler and editor Zach Passero work diligently to keep the intimate action from becoming static, keeping the actors moving and the camera roving to maintain interest.

Yet the film is essentially an extended conversation, and Veach hasn’t come up with dialogue worthy of the effort Lang, in particular, puts into it.  The script aims for the sort of propulsive rhythm and tennis-court-style back-and-forth that David Mamet, for one, mastered. But mostly it comes across as repetitive, with Joe simply restating what the old man has just said as a question, so that a response can then carry things forward.  This gets tiresome quickly, allowing tedium to replace tension.

Of course, all the words point toward a destination, which is intended to be surprising but will have been figured out by most viewers long before it arrives.  The mysteries the screenplay establishes in the early going simply turn out to be not so mysterious after all, and the way the explanation is realized is more pretentious than provocative.

So while it’s nice that Lang was allowed to take the wheel for a change, it’s a pity the vehicle he’s driving wheezes along the way and sputters to a stop.