In this day and age when a medium-budget production with A-list stars like Silver Linings Playbook is classified as an "Indie," it's disconcerting to watch something like Joan Micklin Silver's Hester Street. This affecting, low-key period drama from 1975 is real independent filmmaking - raw, scrappy, personal.

While Hester Street remains best known for the Oscar-nominated lead performance by Carol Kane (Taxi; Gotham) as the mousy wife of a cocksure Russian expat in 1890s New York, the movie portrays the immigrant experience with gritty realism and a shot of humor. For the screenplay, Silver adapted from a novella published in 1896, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto by Jewish journalist and author Abraham Cahan, making the story both an accurate chronicle of Russian Jews assimilated themselves in American and a more generally uplifting tale of a woman maintaining her own identity despite the pressure to assimilate.

Like 1983's Mexican immigrant tale El Norte, Hester Street presents a grim, sometimes darkly humorous view of coming to America and attempting to fit in. Both movies have a cynical yet realistic view that, even amongst those who ought to be helping each other out, there's a pecking order. We see it in the opening scenes, where a tactless, mustachioed gent named Jake (Steven Keats) invites a fresh-off-the-boat Russian Jew to his table at a bar. Jake seems friendly enough in an obnoxious way, but the guest's halting speech and Old World dress is ridiculed by Jake, his drinking buddies, and his girlfriend, Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh). We eventually learn that Jake himself recently came to America from Russia, where his wife Gitl (Kane) and their young son, Yossele await their arrival to join him in New York. Starting with changing his name from Yankl, Jake has adopted the American mode of dress, taken on a swaggering desire for money, and discarded the religious piety of the old country - but Gitl is reluctant to do the same once she arrives. Jake's first order is to rechristen their son by the name of Joey, which the docile Gitl accepts unquestionably. As Jake attempts to get Gitl to speak English and throw out the severe wig and black clothing traditional orthodox Jewish wives wear, the tension in their marriage becomes unbearable. With the help of the couple's friendly, modernized neighbor, Mrs. Kavarsky (Doris Roberts), Gitl eventually learns to stand on her own two feet and not be so dependent on her husband (who has his own plans involving his mistress, Mamie).

Although it's tempting to view Hester Street as a feminist statement, in actuality it's just a good, absorbing story skillfully brought to the screen by the writer-director, Silver. She guided Carol Kane to an understated performance that harkened back to Lillian Gish's fragile-yet-determined onscreen image. Her work is matched by Keats as the well-intentioned yet egotistical husband. Keats, an actor who kicked around forever on '70s-'80s television yet never got his due, delivers a good performance that convey's Jake's ambition and selfish drive to make something of himself (even if he does it all wrong, leaving poor Gitl in the dust). When considering that this was a period flick made on the tiniest of budgets, Silver tidily recreated the atmosphere of Jews struggling in 1890s New York in an intimate, evocative manner (it's worth mentioning that much of the dialogue is spoken in subtitled Yiddish, which Kane, Keats and the other actors handle smoothly).

Silver is one of those filmmakers whose impact has lessened over time, not due to changing tastes but the mere fact that many of her movies have gone into hiding. Some of her more acclaimed films such as Between the Lines (1977) and Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979; a personal fave) have been kept out of circulation for far too long (MGM put out Between the Lines on m.o.d. DVD, while Chilly Scenes has gone m.i.a. on home video since the '80s). While it's great to see Hester Street back on a good-quality Blu Ray from Scorpion Releasing, having more Silver freely available on DVD and Blu would give a more complete picture of her work.