Starring Ennis Esmer. Rating unavailable.

Big News From Grand Rock manages to be both a clever character study and a gentle comedy, casually adding a few tidbits about society in the Information Age.

As played by Turkish-born standup comic Ennis Esmer, the main character being studied is one Leonard Crane, a small-town newspaper editor more dedicated to his work than to anything else. A socially awkward decidedly non-snappy dresser, he’s determined to get the best out of a bad crew, including his Ted Baxter–like lead reporter (veteran second banana Peter Keleghan), a grumpy shirker (Tammy Isbell), and a newbie (Kristin Booth) who’s scared of her own shadow.

The bigger problem is that no one is buying ads in Grand Rock’s only paper, the Weekly Ledger. The rag’s owner (Canadian great Gordon Pinsent, who’ll turn 85 this summer) is himself weakly drifting to the ledge; their office is worth more as real estate than as anything resembling the Fifth Estate. Determined to “turn things around” (his favourite phrase), Leonard starts digging deeper for exciting stories. Unfortunately, his main research venue is the local video store, where the smirking owner (Smallville’s Aaron Ashmore) points him to “older” titles like Multiplicity and Adventures in Babysitting, whose plots he cheerfully reduces to sensational headlines.

Soon, townsfolk believe there are secret cloning experiments going on at a nearby hospital, a notion that moves papers while attracting the ire of the stroppy mayor (Gordon’s daughter, Leah Pinsent) and the attentions of a midsized newspaper chain. The latter sends an actual reporter (the quirkily funny Meredith MacNeill), who interests and frightens Leonard in equal amounts. She’s notably unconvinced by his tales of meeting main source “Michael Douglasson” in an underground parking garage—considering that Grand Rock has none. (The good-looking film was mostly shot in Midland, Ontario.)

As you might imagine, Lenny’s fabricated reportage accidentally leads to some actual skullduggery, but for his debut feature, writer-director Daniel Perlmutter keeps the proportions exactly right, balancing a steady stream of small laughs with a story that engages, mainly through the hearty efforts of actors all on the same page—Page One, you could say.