This is a road movie shot through the cracked lens of a destroyed culture. The plot concerns two unlikely childhood pals from the Lame Deer Cheyenne reservation in Montana: Buddy Red Bow (A Martinez), a cynical veteran of wars foreign (Vietnam) and domestic (Wounded Knee); and Philbert Bono (Gary Farmer), a 300-pound gentle giant who travels in the ether of an ancient culture. Of the two, wiry Buddy is the "heavy"; Philbert's affect is a strange (and lovely) weightlessness. (But it is Philbert who is most adaptable to modern times, making religious contacts over CB radio and Hershey Bar offerings to the gods.) In Philbert's four-wheeled "pony," the two take off for Santa Fe, although Philbert continually sidetracks the mission toward mystical monuments in his quest to "gather up the medicine." They've left the poverty of the reservation for a less tangible kind of poverty as they crisscross an alien nation. This independent feature has its flaws, to be sure-from strained politics to a goofball buddy-film coating-but its eerie lyricism comes through, like the Cheyenne ruins whose spirits strain to rise through the asphalt.