If Being There's Chance the Gardener were younger, smarter, and a medical student, he might look and act something like Peter Hadley (Jeremy Strong), the character at the center of Humboldt County. After his own father (a nicely understated Peter Bogdanovich), who is also one of his med school professors, fails him out of med school, Peter has a drunken one-night stand with a lounge singer named Bogart (Fairuza Balk) and then goes along for the ride with her to Humboldt County. Peter is a character who has seemingly always just gone along with the ride, though until now the ride has been the a conventional, emotionally void trek through higher learning. When Bogart bolts after one night in Humboldt, he's left stranded with her pot-farming foster family.

Max (Chris Messina), Bogart's hometown beau and the prodigal son of the marijuana-cultivating clan (note: he and Bogart aren't related, it's just complicated), refuses to take Peter to the bus station the next day, forcing Peter to spend another night and then leading him to stick around for several—a week, the whole summer, it's unclear. Time and motivation get a bit hazy, but what can you expect in the marijuana capitol of North America?

As played by Strong, young Peter has a long, drawn face, large sunken eyes with deep circles beneath, a big nose, a shorn flattop of curly hair, and ears that stick-out a bit. The camera of first-time writer/directors Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs often lingers on his unwitting face as he observes the counterculture chaos around him. He's an uptight, unfulfilled square in a world of bongs and eccentrics, but Grodsky and Jacobs don't exploit the premise for cheap laughs. Rather, they poke amusing, poignant holes in the life views of both the tightly wound Peter and Bogart's boho clan.

With the always wonderful Frances Conroy (Six Feet Under) playing the sweet but troubled family matriarch, it's easy to understand why motherless Peter stays. Conroy and Strong put in wonderfully human performances, but it's Messina that steals nearly every scene. His handsome face, smoothly crackling voice, and compact frame lend Max a dark, troubling beauty and make him the perfect foil for Strong's tall, awkward Peter. Max tells Peter that he first dipped into his mom's stash when he was just 8 years old; Peter says he was drinking Kool-Aid and watching the Smurfs at that age. "You have your drugs, I have mine," Max quips. It's a line that coming from a less able actor could seem trite, but coming from Messina to Strong, it's a near perfect moment. After last seeing Messina play a rolling-paper-thin character in Woody Allen's abysmal Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it's a true pleasure to see him work with better material.

Yet, the human characters, and the fine actors who play them, are almost overshadowed by the film's greatest character: Humboldt County itself. Shooting on location in lush (and increasingly rare for an indie film) 35mm and peppering scenes with amusing minor characters and details, Grodsky and Jacobs lovingly evoke the beauty and the quirkiness of the Northern California coast. Amid all the beauty and quirk, the plot has occasional lapses in believability as the film reaches its climax and the feds tramples the weedy paradise, but no matter: Peter's character development and the film's emotional truths ring loud and clear despite the smoke.