In “Green Light,” Lorde sings about that moment when you’re stuck and desperately wanting to be free. For her, it’s the time after a relationship implodes; where she’s still thinking back on what was and is unable to go forward. “I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it!” she yells. It’s a completely self-aware line where she knows she’s stuck and is waiting for that moment when she can finally let go and embrace the future.

Graham Denham’s Greenlight, meanwhile, is about a man named Jack (Chase Williamson) who desperately wants to break free from his own situation and, well, he also wants that green-light so he can get on with his directing aspirations. “Green Light” is that anticipation of knowing that eventually you can move on or can succeed. But right now? Right now, you’re stuck in the shit.

And Jack is currently in the shit.

Greenlight opens on a prairie. A hot cowboy (Sean Keller) stares down the barrel of his gun at a man in a black hat. It’s a standoff. But cut, cut! The producer doesn’t want to make Westerns. Turns out, we’re at a pitch meeting with Jack trying valiantly to close a deal to direct a feature. He offers to make it horror, but the producer is not impressed. They don’t do horror...well, except for their last picture. But that’s different.

“That was elevated.”

He then breaks it to Jack in the most disheartening way: “No one’s gonna give you a feature until you’ve made a feature.” It’s a Catch-22. After the disastrous meeting, Jack goes home to lick his wounds under the care of his girlfriend Shantel (Evanne Friedmann). Unlike the stuck Jack, Shantel is a star on the rise, having wrote her soon-to-be-released first novel as a Freshman in college. She offers supportive platitudes about being a team and that things will work out. Her parents disagree.

At a dinner at Shantel’s parent’s house (a painting of Shantel in a white dress with a tiara hanging over the table), they talk as if Jack’s not there. Jack tries to give an impassioned defense and explanation of the horrors of getting into the film industry…which Shantel’s father reduces to a single sentence: “So you’re a bum.” But a phone call from a producer named Bob Moseby (Chris Browning) gives him a chance at that green light. And Jack wants it.

Moseby will be the first to tell you that he makes shitty horror movies, but they make him money. And he’s willing to give Jack a chance because...well, he’ll work twice as hard as a veteran director for half the pay. Chris Browning perfectly plays Moseby as a mix between a used car salesman and a scene-chewing Peter Weller. At one point in his initial interview with Jack, he stops the discussion to yank out a stray hair from Jack’s scalp because it was annoying the shit out of him. Browning’s expressive face can go from being your eccentric best friend and confidant to a rabid dog in an instant and his performance is one of the best parts of Greenlight. He plays such a fun foil to Chase’s naive and hopeful desires.

Moseby already has a cast, which becomes Jack’s first hurdle. There’s Damien (Victor Turpin) who’s new to filming but is so excited to make the movie. There’s Sarah (Nicole Alexandra Shipley), an actress Jack met while PAing who gave Moseby his name. And then there’s Nancy (Caroline Williams), an older actress who, it turns out, is married to Moseby. But they don’t have a very lovey-dovey relationship and love to throw barbs at each other.

After the first day of shooting, Moseby tells Jack that this movie will be special. Why? “I need the final kill in the movie to be real,” Moseby tells him, as dead serious as the body in his Moseby’s car. A body shot by a gun that has Jack’s prints and DNA.

So, Jack. How far will you go?

Greenlight is one of those movies where creative people working on a project discover the connections between art and real life. The movie Jack’s been hired to work on is a psychological thriller called Sleep Experiment, where the characters slowly lose their mind due to a lack of sleep and paranoia. Jack, meanwhile, gets pulled into a spiral of despair and paranoia as he starts to guess and second guess Moseby’s intentions and actively tries to counter them.

Written by Patrick Robert Young from a story by the director Graham Denman, Greenlight is at its best when it’s caustically lampooning film development. The story in a story aspect provides an edgy and dry sense of humor to the proceedings. It’s one of those dark comedies where you’re never quite sure whether you’re supposed to be laughing.

But it shows its hand in subtle ways. Like a lot of independent horror films recently, it’s bathed in neon, bisexual lighting as reds and blues and purples saturate the sets and characters. In one wink and a nudge sequence, Jack actually stands above the sets and uses a boom mic to spy on the cast and pick up their secret conversations.

Some of it doesn’t quite work out. The relationship between Jack and Shantel just sort of ends as the plot necessitates. I also found myself wondering why Moseby would even tell Jack about his plans to use a real bullet to kill an actor on screen, when it would have been easier to just pretend it was an accident. But Browning’s performance as Moseby sells it and I think it ties into the artifice about making an indie film that’s...about making indie films. As the film gets to the third act and the caustic humor really takes center stage, I got caught up in its deliciously evil depiction of how hard it is to get a break in this industry.

And while it’s not a perfect movie and the themes and pacing are a bit muddled in the second half, Greenlight really nails the relationship between the young upstart director and the world-weary producer whose soul has been crushed. At perhaps the realest moment, Moseby tells Jacks, “The highs are high but the lows, man. They’re truly low. This business will eat you up and spit you out. Steal your soul and break your heart. Sometimes you give it everything and you get nothing in return.” Or, as Lorde would say, “Those great whites, they have big teeth.”

I think Moseby would agree.