Don Owen's debut feature Nobody Waved Goodbye is such a simple piece of work that its emotional power is almost shocking. Shot in grainy black and white with unobtrusive hand-held cameras, this movie feels more like a documentary than the scripted drama it happens to be, and it's the film's slightly unkempt honesty that makes it so effective. Following a few months in the life of a troubled teenager who strikes out on his own, Nobody Waved Goodbye paints none of its characters strictly as heroes or villains. While the audience's sympathies obviously lie with clever, but rebellious, Peter, Peter Kastner's performance also makes it clear that Peter is a bit too smart for his own good, and the many adult authority figures he rails against (parents, employers, probation officers) obviously know a good bit more than he does about the realities of life in the real world -- no matter how tactless they are in discussing them. (The movie also avoids the trap of making Peter a standard-issue juvenile delinquent; instead, Owen and Kastner have fashioned a would-be beatnik from the Canadian suburbs who obviously doesn't know how to find a road to go on.) Julie Biggs is no less affecting as Peter's sweet, but more pragmatic, girlfriend, and John Vernon is appropriately menacing in an early role as the less-than-scrupulous manager of a parking lot. While the passage of more than 40 years has dated parts of Goin' Down the Road (Kastner's banjo-strumming would-be hipster pose seems rather quaint four decades on), the unfettered realism of Kastner and Biggs' performances still aims straight for the heart without missing, and this remains a key film in the struggle for Canadian cinema to establish its own identity. It's difficult to imagine other low-key gems such as Goin' Down the Road, Paperback Hero, or The Hard Part Begins existing without its influence.