Every year, there's an indie movie or two with enough deep flaws to keep it from a wide audience but with a great central performance that really deserves to be seen. Last year, Robin Wright Penn rocked in Sorry, Haters, but no one saw it and the film didn't come together in the end. Earlier this year, everyone missed John Malkovich's work in Color Me Kubrick and, now available on DVD, Peter Krause's stunning performance in Civic Duty. In the film, Krause plays Terry Allen, a guy who gets laid off just after 9/11. As the world around him gets more and more paranoid, Allen falls into a deep funk and starts to think his neighbor might be a terrorist. Too quickly for his tastes, the rest of the world seems to go back to focusing on all the standard daily problems. If no one else is going to stop the terrorists, maybe Terry can do it himself. He's got enough time on his hands. Is the guy next door a terrorist or is Terry going crazy? The FBI agent (Richard Schiff) he contacts and his wife (Kari Matchett) thinks it's the latter, but the strange chemicals and trail of bank receipts in his neighbor's apartment make Terry think otherwise. And then things get real interesting.

Krause, who was so great for years on Six Feet Under, does the best work of his career in Civic Duty. He could have easily sent Terry over the edge in a Travis Bickle-esque wave of paranoia, but he keeps his character grounded in relatable behavior. We're never quite sure if Terry is nuts and, even if he is, his actions are all understandable. That's a credit to Krause's work in balancing the realistic and the paranoid. How far Terry is willing to go is never clear and Krause does an amazing job of keeping the audience on edge. Is he a hero or someone going slowly insane?

The problem with Civic Duty is that it writes itself into a corner. We really don't want an answer to the question or hero or nutjob. Neither could be satisfying. Terry is right about his neighbor and the film reads like a warning to Americans to start looking out their window. Terry is wrong about his neighbor and we've lost a hero to root for. There could have been a way out of the corner Civic Duty works itself into, especially with a performance as good as Krause's, but the writer and director never find it. In fact, they come up with something worse. The final minutes of Civic Duty are downright awful with a twist or two that are hard-to-watch they're so out-of-line with the rest of the film. It's as if the team didn't know where to go, so they threw a dart at a board of ideas and went with whatever hit. See it for Krause's incredibly great work, but be warned that everything around him isn't nearly as good, especially the final reel.