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First-time director Joshua Leonard’s The Lie stretches the truth of its source material — an obsidian fragment from author T.C. Boyle, published by the New Yorker in 2008 — until its every glint is polished to a self-affirming glow. There’s a dark crackle to Boyle’s first-person account of a young man compressed to the point of fracture by the drudgery of his work as a tape logger at a film production house and the shackling disappointment of his domestic lot: He has a law student wife and an infant at home. Unable to face another day at the digital mine, the young man’s avoidant, off-white fibbing gives way to an inky whopper, and his sins soon yield a shopping bag full of money. If two decades of Coen brothers movies have taught us anything, it’s this: As good as a gun, that thing’s going to go off.

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REVIEW: The Lie Explores the Self-Defeat of Committing by Halves — But Only By Half