One of the most significant contributors to the American independent cinema that developed over the late 1980s and 1990s, Hal Hartley has throughout his career created films that defy convention and capture the stranger realities of modern American life. looks at all of Hartley's film releases - from cult classics such as and to oddball genre experiments such as to short films such as - and makes a case for seeing Hartley as an important and successful American auteur, despite the director's decline in status in the later stages of his career. Employing both industrial and close textual analysis, the book considers aspects of Hartley's work such as genre, gender and form, as well as dimensions far less frequently discussed in studies of indie directors, such as place and cultural identity, offering a broad and innovative study of a productive filmmaker who continues to show a singular disregard for the expectations of both the mainstream and the indie cinema industries.