Photo Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

Intimately tying the political and personal, Josh Tickell's deft if sensationalist doc Fields of Fuel rallies with optimism against the nation's failing policies regarding renewable resources, particularly, as the audience is to hear repeatedly for the next 90 minutes, the use of biodiesel. While not nuanced or artful in its filmmaking style, relaying too heavily at times on its pop soundtrack, Fields of Fuel is the type of populist doc that kicks mental engines into gear, its message so powerful that it sends fatalistic tremors up the spine.

Moved from enviro-friendly Australia to cancer ally Louisiana, and watching his mother during the time suffer nine miscarriages, Tickell spent his adolescence developing an acute anger against corporate pollution practices and the lack of government intervention. Proactive to a fault, Tickell's high school science fair project on cancer ally waterways put him in direct opposition to state representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency. As Tickell crafts this early part of the story, he demonstrates with ease how oil refining and distribution effects regular folks dependent on its use. Yet, as emotionally charged as this segment of the film is, the potency of its sadness is entirely washed over by the continually pedantic tone of Tickell's commentary.

Weaving a history lesson into this personal journey, Tickell manages to hit a chord, however, when he assesses that Standard Oil Company's John D. Rockefeller had lobbied for prohibition in order to blockade Henry Ford's success with early ethanol fuel options. Now no longer able to produce ethanol, Ford was forced to shut down his service stations, the last of those closing the year before prohibition was repealed. There's no doubt this examination of the country's past is the greatest revelation throughout the film.

In the last large thematic section of Fields of Fuel, Tickell focuses on biodiesel education, selling it as a less expensive, more enviro-friendly although not infallible alternative. In talking with experts and manufacturers of the product, Tickell discovers a three tier solution process. The first layer of energy use will fall on biodiesel, the second on the expanse of mass transit nationwide, the third on initiatives to increase solar energy use. No one option, interviewees tell Tickell, serves as a panacea, and so while Fields of Fuel is on its surface pro-biodiesel, the film also to its great credit recognizes the multi-layered challenges with reductively embracing that one solution.

He's taken us this far, Tickell says to close the film. "Now it's up to you." It's a groan-worthy, more than condescending ending, bringing to mind the image of Tickell as teacher wagging his finger at a classroom of uneducated American students all wearing the classic conical dummy caps. Yet, there's an undeniable truth to Tickell's statement as well. He can take us no further in developing and promoting renewable energy resources than we are willing to go for ourselves.