A carefully crafted homage to modern Americana music and the childhood years he spent in Austin singer/songwriter bars, writer-director Justin Corsbie’s debut feature film Hard Luck Love Song took an unusual piece of source material — a four-minute song — and turned it into a sprawling fusion of a thriller, love story, and neo-noir western.

Based on Todd Snider’s “Just Like Old Times,” Hard Luck Love Song tells the story of Jesse (played by Michael Dorman), a wandering troubadour who makes a living hustling pool in dive bars with grand ambitions to be a musician and songwriter. The film follows Jesse’s rough-and-tumble journey as he encounters his once-love Carla (Sophia Bush) and the two embark on a drunken, drug-infused reenactment of the old days, with some new twists.

“It was definitely this specific song that kind of sparked the original idea, but that also kicked off a more conceptual look at music and the storytelling journey that I’ve been on,” Corsbie says.

Deeply rooted in Austin’s music scene from childhood, “it was the source material, and kind of a world that I knew really well,” Corsbie says of the dive bars and musical world inhabited by Jesse and the other characters of the film. In this “love letter to the gritty Americana world” (which he co-wrote with Craig Ugoretz), Corsbie pays homage to artists with a “road-worn, weary soundtrack” that includes Townes Van Zandt’s “Buckskin Stallion Blues,” Daniel Johnston’s “I’ll Do Anything But Break Dance For Ya, Darling,” and Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris’ “Return of the Grievous Angel.”

Due to the quintessential heartbeat that musical choices infuse into a story, unlike the typical screenwriting process, Corsbie and Ugoretz wrote specific songs into the script that needed to be cleared before production.

But this meticulous attention to musical detail didn’t stop as Corsbie and Ugoretz “leapfrogged” drafts of the script between each other. The film also boasts of a hidden cache of easter eggs for eagle-eyed (and eared) audience members, particularly Snider fans, that demonstrates the comprehensive knowledge and care the writing duo used to expand “Just Like Old Times” into an entire universe.

Some of these details are personal embellishments, such as the Dead Milkmen t-shirt Jesse wears throughout the film, which belonged to Corsbie when he was a 10-year-old frequenting punk and alt-rock music clubs.

“That was neat to have him wear this family heirloom of mine,” Corsbie reminisces.

Others are nods to the troubadour and Americana roots tradition, with veiled references to John Prine, Kris Kristofferson, Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, and “various other amazing, iconic musicians in this world,” Corsbie explains. In one scene, viewers can catch a glimpse of a newspaper with a chicken image on it that reads: “Roosters laying chickens and chickens laying eggs,” a line from a Prine song.

Though the film’s emotional throughlines and character arcs translate to any audience, it’s these genre nods that make watching the film with other insiders (such as Snider fans or Prine heads) “just a different experience,” Corsbie says.

Ugoretz also tries to describe the feeling of seeing the small trimmings written into a script fully realized on set: “When I picked the name the Tumble Inn for the motel/hotel they hang out in, I didn’t really think anything of it, I thought it was just kind of a clever name,” he says. “And then when I drove up on set for the first time and saw the big neon sign Tumble Inn, as a first-time writer, that’s a feeling that’s really hard to describe.”

The duo sometimes had to fight for these moments to be included, as the neon sign was originally going to cost $20,000 — a high price tag for a simple detail. Luckily, “we all kind of pushed really hard for it and they made it happen,” Corsbie says.

Capturing the essence of Snider’s song and translating it into an entirely new medium, it turns out, wasn’t too difficult for the pair, who created a working draft of the script within three months of coming up with the original idea. Casting began just one month later.

The two described a shared writing process wherein they would pass different acts of the script back and forth on Final Draft, each contributing edits. “It was a co-writer’s dream, because Justin had already done a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of story you know, when I came on board,” says Ugoretz, who helped further flesh out the plot points and characters, among other screenwriting aspects. The pair passed the script back and forth three or four times, executing each other’s notes and shaping it into the film it is today. “The idea was there, and it was just a matter of hammering it into a screenplay format,” Ugoretz says.

However, the duo’s easy collaboration couldn’t stop the two-year hiatus that the film sat in before its release due to what Corsbie called “this strange kind of black hole of Covid.” Though the feature finished shooting in 2019 and was getting interest from distributors in early 2020, the pandemic completely disrupted its release.

“It was a lot of hurrying up and then waiting,” Corsbie says.

But screening the film to a crowd of Todd Snider fans, as well as the artist himself, at Americana fest in Nashville a month ago was worth the wait.

“I imagine it’s kind of a surreal thing the first time we screened it for him. It’s like here’s this piece of art of mine, with some kind of relation to my own actual life, being kind of reinterpreted into this whole new fictional piece of art. And I don’t think he quite knew what to expect, and kind of was in shock a little bit,” Corsbie says, describing the excitement and happiness he witnessed as Snider watched the film with friends, music industry members, and fans. “A couple of weeks from opening nationwide in theaters, I think he was able to step back and go ‘wow, this really happened’ and this doesn't happen to many — if ever any — singer-songwriters, so I think it was a pretty special experience for him.”

Hard Luck Love Song will be available on PVOD on November 9th.