With a miniscule budget of $5 million dollars and a veritable who's who of movie and TV actors filling its cast, Sunshine State projects on screen like genius. In the pattern of the writer-director-editor's previous films, John Sayles offers a complicated drama good enough to excite viewers disappointed by action titles currently filling the multiplex.

Unconcerned with CGI technology or comic book heroes, Sunshine State is, instead, the deeply affecting story of community as told through the overlapping lives of a few dozen Floridians and various interlopers into their community. Centered on the fictional Paradise Island with its two neighboring communities, one white and one black, a group of out-of-town developers begins buying up the land for conversion into a luxury paradise. Very quickly their corruption and manipulation come in conflict with the native population, some of whom have a generations' deep connection to the Island.

Complicating matters further are a series of personal stories providing some of the year's best big screen performances. Perhaps the two most memorable concern Marly Temple (Edie Falco) and Desiree Perry (Angela Bassett), two representative members of the racially divided community.

For Marly, a 6th generation white Islander, managing her father's restaurant/motel is a dead end experience. Dogged by an ex-husband, put off by her lover and cut adrift from her youthful idealism, she's looking for a way out. But not at the cost of selling the family business that's strategically on a cornerstone of the developers' plans.

For Desiree, a black Island refugee, returning home with a new husband in tow is a lesson in coming full circle. Having been forced to leave 25 years earlier as a pregnant teenager, she's managed to come back a middle-aged woman with scars of experience. Though angry and troubled, she's ready to make peace with her demons.

Weaving these strands together also involves a non-profit theater, the idealism of urban planning, the troubles of aging and an annual Buccaneer's Day Parade along with widowhood, pyromania, segregation's legacy and the football culture of the American South. Thusly, and in bold strokes of story-telling bravado, Sunshine State realistically sketches its illustration of gentrification, folksy values and greed in a novelistic way. Likewise Sayles and his cast manage to create a virtual community of three-dimensional people speaking some of the richest movie dialogue in recent memory.

By illustrating, "nature on a leash", as the opening scene suggests, Sunshine State is a lesson about modern people trying to balance history with progress. Unlike its high-powered summer competition, though, it's a story without explosions, space travel or guns and this much makes it exceptional. Luckily, it's a terrific little movie released in time for cinephiles ready to sit still for two hours being amazed.