From the cherry-picked singer-songwriter tunes on its soundtrack to the typeface of its opening title card, "The Wendell Baker Story" clearly looks to another decade as its home: the '70s, when intimate comedies could be quirky without pretense and when Harry Dean Stanton and Seymour Cassel (the co-stars and cultural good-luck charms of this picture) became familiar faces. In large part the film succeeds, feeling like a good-natured throwback, albeit one wearing a fresh-starched three-act structure whose folds couldn't be crisper if they were ironed out by a screenwriting seminar. Boxoffice prospects will depend on marketing savvy.

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