Mr. Smith's deadpan fiction feature is packed with the hard-won, unfakeable detail and dialogue of experience — hilarious, bleak, absurd, numbing — from the front lines of minimum-wage monotony. Easily one of the decade's best indie debuts, "American Job" sticks by its lanky, slack-jawed protagonist (Mr. Russell) through a series of shuffling stints at a plastic-mold factory, a fast-food chicken joint, a telemarketing farm, and so on. Faithful to Mr. Russell's point of view with long-take scenes, and fleshed out with a lived-in cast of co-workers and bosses, "American Job" rivals comedies such as Mike Judge's "Office Space" as a workplace classic. It also effortlessly nails the vivid, ordinary-life-gothic vignettes that earned Terry Zwigoff's graphic-novel adaptation of "Ghost World" praise, without adopting a showy skewed view. It's funny but tinged with deep frustration.
NICOLAS RAPOLD NY SUN