If you have cable subscribers trapped in small towns they shoulda left long ago – here’s a film of consummate empathy with their predicament.

Antihero Everett Winfield, pushing 60, is still haunted by “Hungry Ghosts:” high school girlfriends, a teen brother’s drowning, his fading health and burro-racing prowess, even his ability to make ends meet.

Anyone who’s sweated foreclosure or late payments from people owing will feel right at home in Everett’s precarious world. He says he just wants to get through life not interfering nor being interfered with, but he’s as wedded as can be … to the bank, to the feedstore, to the weather, to the (live)stock market. He reflects the burros he loves and husbands; and like these loveable beasts, there may be a lot more Everetts out there than we imagine (40,000,000 burros worldwide, the film reports).

Among the flick’s charms: nary a brand-name nor logo in sight; the dialogue never sounds written nor read; plentiful burro walk- and run-ons. Yet this is no “Phar Lap” horse-opera: several species connect Everett to the mountain soil with which he is so comfortable and on which he hopes to be buried.

Some of your subscribers will think: “Death of a Salesman: The High Desert Years,” and well they might. Like Willy Lomans (or like an old gold mine, for that matter), Everett Winfield is done played-out. He’s got woman-trouble, money-trouble, and a girlfriend’s baby-on-the-way to add to his huggable (and hungry) foals. “Things are moving so fast these days,” he laments, and he muses about his devolution toward “lonesome old fart.”

I won’t tell you the ending, but the message in director/actor Curtis Imrie’s collage-of-a-tale may ring a bell: no man is an island, even if the Rockies are as far from the ocean as one can get on this continent.