While on the road, Mercer who enjoys making up stories in which his mother is on far-flung adventures listens to a recording of a western novel whose words complement the landscape luminously photographed in lightly saturated shades by Byron Shah and the score’s plaintive indie-rock songs, many written by M. The performances are correspondingly spontaneous. Much of the dialogue is so quirky it sounds overheard instead of scripted. Hynes, who wrote the screenplay, seems well aware of the challenge of breathing fresh life into a familiar formula. What could be a bigger indie-movie cliché than a road trip in which a dewy young pilgrim on a quest is initiated into manhood and discovers the craziness of the world? But you can also view Mercer’s trip as a contemporary variation of a classic American odyssey in the tradition of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Following clues from one location to the next, he discovers that everywhere Arlen has stayed he has left behind wreckage and bad feelings. Mercer, whose mother died eight months earlier, is on the trail of Arlen (Jsu Garcia), his older half-brother, whom he hasn’t seen in more than a decade, to inform him of their mother’s death. Mercer’s vehicle is a well-traveled Volvo station wagon he impulsively steals at a car wash and drives off into the unknown. Los Angeles Ensenada, Mexico and back, with many stops along the way. The long and winding road traveled by Mercer White (Lou Taylor Pucci), the ingenuous 19-year-old protagonist of Martin Hynes’s wispy but appealing film “The Go-Getter,” leads from Eugene, Ore., to Reno, Nev.
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