His third feature still unseen by the commercial public, Ramin Bahrani is already such a critical and festival darling that 2005 Man Push Cart and 2007 Chop Shop and that third, Goodbye Solo, have just screened at the Museum of Modern Art “Filmmaker in Focus.” At a separate reviewers’ showing, the latter bears the hallmarks of the first two in location shoots (this time, Bahrani’s native North Carolina), first-time feature actors, and understated interior development in the emotions and self-awareness of plain people a bit out of the mainstream.

Other recent similarly themed and targeted indies are female-directed Frozen River and, especially, Wendy and Lucy, both also limited in locale and cast, and place- or character-driven and –titled. Like Kelly Reichardt in her latter woman-and-her-dog tale, Bahrani divulges next to nothing of prior events -- via, respectively, a payphone call to Indiana and a few words in a notebook -- and a future is not set in stone during final moments of personal growth in, not renunciation, but a letting go.

The internal nature of story-experience for Winston-Salem immigrant cab driver Solo (Souléymane “Solo” Sy Savané) is underscored by Michael Simmonds’ camerawork, daring in simplicity without being claustrophobic, and counterpointed by final outward vistas above autumn leaves through wind and cloud on the  Blowing Rock outcrop. There are but few street scenes, overexposed in natural sunlight; and a brick home, motel room, a bar, an interview windowed over an airport, are secondary to the number 64 taxi Solo drives at night with only highway lights, headlamps and neon lens-flare penetrating the black inside the vehicle. Cabbie and fare are sidelit from these, so that angularities and cragginess of faces, and teeth and eyes, illustrate the story of thoughts and words unspoken.

Cheerily talkative to his “Big Dog” riders and in love with pregnant Mexican wife (Carmen Leyva) -- although an admirer of other women -- the Senegalese dreams of passing the flight-attendant school exam, a pie-in-the-sky proposition that has gotten him banished from her home and bed except for visits with stepdaughter Alex (Diana Franco Galindo). Apart from the unseen, voice-only Willard’s Cab Company female dispatcher, the characters come across flat, the more so because Solo and his “personal passenger” so dominate the foreground.

That passenger is seventy-year-old William (Red West, ex-Memphis Mafia and lifelong Elvis buddy, movie stuntman and supporting film and television actor). He is taciturn and defensively private, stoic in acceptance of regrets, determined to get rid of trappings and orchestrate his fate on his terms. Offering a cash deposit up front for a one-way trip to the mountain peak, the strong sad man gnaws at the cab driver’s conscience, humanity and African sense of family ties even in the midst of his own problems and imminent fatherhood.

Race and ethnicity are not an issue. Characters have different color skins and backgrounds and speak various, or several, languages, but they are all family of man. While the lumbering white man pares his belongings to a minimum necessary to move into a motel, the wiry concerned black man talks his way into that other’s room and, the little that is possible, his life. Unrealistically wise for her nine years, Alex charms the elderly white, himself ironic but discerning with the driver’s friends and drawn to seeing movies at one particular theater and to short chitchat with the young ticket attendant there (Trevor Metscher).

SPOILER ALERT

Solo’s probing leads to confrontation and separation. The two, however, have picked up an understanding of each other, and more importantly of themselves, that will not be denied and that, in a charged ending, needs no words.

Goodbye Solo says a great deal with the compression of the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet form and its concluding-couplet reversal. Particularly apropos is the Bard’s Sonnet 73, most known for its opening metaphor for age; less familiar is the ending twist in which the older speaker’s death is not to be his leave-taking but, rather, that of the posited younger listener, who is the future and needs to learn what it’s all about.

(Released by Roadside Attractions; not rated by MPAA.)