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I wasn't expecting much from Spread — after an indifferently-received debut at Sundance, it played a handful of theaters for a period of time so short you'd need high-end physics equipment to measure it –  starring Ashton Kutcher (who also produced) as a young, charming L.A. man who keeps a roof over his head and the finer things in his life by deliberately seducing older, well-to-do women. He's not quite a prostitute. But if you look at his life hard enough, you can kinda sorta see it. What most interested me about Spread, when I finally caught up with it on DVD, is that the movie's in fact about Kutcher's character, Nikki, looking at his life hard until he kinda sorta gets a real look at what he is and what he's doing. …

Much like another 2009 Sundance film, Shrink, Spread exists in part to give an actor a stretch of a role (Kevin Spacey in Shrink, Kutcher in Spread) and also showcases a very different kind of L.A.; Nikki may end up in palatial mansions in the Hollywood Hills if he plays his cards right, but if worse comes to worst he's exiled to his friends' shabby places in Silverlake or Los Feliz. And while it's possibly unkind to say that having Kutcher play a good-looking youth who gets by on charm may be the easiest casting task ever accomplished, it's also worth noting that Kutcher digs in here, and plays something hard and ugly under Nikki's soft words and pretty face. Kutcher's voice-over gives a nice second level to the film — Kutcher on-screen is gentle endearments and sassy talk; his narration is blunt, bleak and brutal.

And, as another thing in Spread's favor, it's that rare film that tries to be real about sex — not the Hollywood-standard version of it, where two faces come together across a horizontal space defined by blue backlighting, but something a little more honest and frank. The film's still intent on having its sexy cake and eating it, though, but the fact is that Spread is more sincere and cynical about the market-based realities of the mating game than the vast majority of Hollywood major-studio releases. As Samantha (an excellent Anne Heche) dresses down Nikki in her glass-and-leather mansion, it boils down fairly bitterly: "I support you and you perform sexual favors; is that what this is about?" She says it as an attack. It turns into an embrace, angry and sad and needy.

But if Nikki were just a cad, we wouldn't care — or, rather, we wouldn't watch. He flirts with Heather (Margarita Levieva), a coffee-shop waitress who breaks off one of their meetings to drive off in an $80,000 convertible. No one, it seems, can play a player like another player, but Heather and Nikki can't help but be drawn to each other, with a few moments of stolen bliss before they have to get back to stealing and the grift. Director David Mackenzie has an excellent eye for spaces and places and light –from pool-side evening parties overlooking L.A.'s sprawl to intimate moments in small bedrooms — and he also knows when to get out of the way of his actors. The DVD contains three mildly-diverting making-of mini-documentaries, and the sound and image are both excellent; I found myself hoping the DVD would have a commentary from Mackenzie, but instead it features commentary from Kutcher, Heche and Levieva — nice, but not as nice as hearing the thoughts of the actual person who made the film.

Like I noted above, I wasn't expecting much from Spread, and that may have worked to its benefit — I found myself surprised by its smarter moments, not distracted by the occasional moment of slackness or sloppiness; I also appreciated the film's ending, which unspools in a way that The Beatles would appreciate, and let's leave it at that. Spread could have been a mere rip-off of male-hustler zeitgeist-defining classics like 1975's Shampoo and 1980's American Gigolo — and, in many ways it is, but wouldn't you expect a little history in the depiction of something close to the world's oldest profession? And yet, Spread is smarter than it has to be, sexier than you'd think and sleekly gorgeous; if you open your horizons a little bit, you might be surprised by how much Kutcher gives to the film.

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