THE rural community, where youthful dreams curdle to middle-age disappointment. Where one cannot escape the tinge of shame and regret after the woman you love has gone.

Where dearest friendships have been poisoned by betrayal, or gone the way of a ride out of town. This territory full of unspoken pain has been pinned down by many Irish writers; it has been sung, too, to great effect in American country music. So it makes sense that Northern Irish writer/director Niall Heery should merge the two for his first feature film. He finds a universal key for an old-fashioned male lament.

By melding the two traditions, Heery has crafted his own universe . . . an unspecified place in Ireland, surrounded by forlorn pine trees and a small community of loggers. This is a hinterland of middle-aged males far from the urbane sprawl of the Celtic Tiger.

Here, men wear lumberjack shirts, work timber with their hands and struggle to deal with their shapeless lives and sore feelings. The women are scarce. You will not find these men wearing moisturiser.

The hero Doug (Iain Glen) is a gentle, craggy giant who struggles to find work. His friend Bill (Steven Mackintosh) runs a small engine-repair shop with scant success. He is well-meaning but bumbling and his attempts at keeping his son Tony (Laurence Kinlan) at home only push the young man out the door. Doug and Bill are uneasy about the return from prison of an old friend, Burley. He has done time for a hitand-run and asserts himself like a returning alpha male. He believes one of the gang grassed him in.

Doug gives voice to his frustration by writing country music songs. Iain Glen provides the voice and it is a rich, weary croon. But Doug has no confidence. He has a demo but is terrified of playing it to anybody in case they don't like it. And no wonder.

The community is weighed down with manmade gravity . . . the kind that pulls people and their ideas back to earth. It would not do to allow others escape by floating away on their dreams.

Bill instinctually knocks Doug's music and then supports him when he realises it is good. Similarly, he criticises his own son's attempts at truck-engine repair, before realising he has a talent for it. But Doug's girlfriend is the worst offender. "Don't be encouraging him. You're only putting ideas in his head, " says Agnes (Kathy Kiera Clarke), when the local barman asks Doug if he will play a small gig.

When Doug arrives home one evening and finds another man in the bathroom with her, he has a new idea and that is to leave her and start listening to himself for a change. Small Engine Repair is about this man finding inner confidence to follow his own meagre dream. And how his willingness to face up to himself unearths little tremors that shake some truth out of his supposed friendships.

Iain Glen, a Scottish actor best known for appearing nude beside Nicole Kidman in David Hare's play The Blue Room, and for performances in Song for a Raggy Boy and Tara Road, gives an affecting performance of male vulnerability.

Steven Mackintosh is equally adept as a man who has the tools for engine repair but can't crank his own life.

The script is gently revealing. It generates that inescapable feeling of living in a small town where your failings are the domain of everybody; where you have to drink in the same pub as your enemies and the woman who left you for another man. It also neatly identifies that very Irish thing . . .

the insidious defeatism that knocks down ideas before they can take flight.

Small Engine Repair is not a film of strong visual style but there are moments that linger: Doug turning softly to tears when he hears his song on the radio, struck dumb that he could ever amount to anything. And there's a nicely framed shot of Doug getting a hug from Bill after he loses control of his emotions . . . and his pickup truck . . . and crashes into a tree. A bumper sticker in the foreground reads "honk if you're lonely".

Like Lenny Abrahamson's forthcoming Garage, Niall Heery is exploring an aspect of Ireland that lies on the far side of the boom.

This is an admirable first film of quiet restraint and emotional honesty. It offers the kind of modest hope that holds true to our lives.