Australian Mad Bastards at Sundance

Dean Daley-Jones as TJ, in <i>Mad Bastards</i>. Photo / Supplied

As with Lee Tamahori's The Devil's Double, it was a very big deal for the Australian film, Mad Bastards, to have its world premiere at the Sundance Festival.

Twenty-four representatives from the film packed the quaint Egyptian Theatre in Main Street where the film's co-producers, the musical group The Pigram Brothers, together with pop star Alex Lloyd, sang a few songs in lieu of a lengthy after-film discussion. It was in many ways a pertinent introduction as the film has as much music as dialogue.

While Mad Bastards will surely be a crowd pleaser because of the music, this coming-of-age story about TJ, a tough Aboriginal man who must travel to the Kimberley region of Western Australia to see the son he has never known, also boasts a stellar cast of non-actors, with the exception of lead bastard, Dean Daley-Jones as TJ.

The film in fact has much in common with Taika Waititi's Boy in that it's about a wayward indigenous urban man who inevitably reclaims his cultural heritage through his burgeoning relationship with his son.

Like Waititi, Daley-Jones, a kind of cross between Temuera Morrison (those sculpted facial features) and Hugh Jackman, is a star in the making.

The offspring of a British mother and an Aboriginal father, he was raised in urban Perth, studied ballet in his youth (with Strictly Ballroom's Paul Mercurio) and looked up to Michael Jackson in his teens.

He worked on numerous film and television productions in Sydney before he ended up in Broome where he was working as a roofer and tiler when he applied for a job as a grip on Mad Bastards.

The film's Sydney director, Brendan Fletcher, making his first dramatic feature, wisely cast him in the lead instead.

Fletcher had made documentaries, short films and video clips for the likes of INXS, Russell Crowe's band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, The Pigram Brothers and Lloyd. He had fallen in love with the Kimberly when he visited there in 1997.

"It's the kind of place that can change your life," he says. He became determined to make a film with the Aboriginal men he met there.

"I hung around up there with these guys who were undiscovered, who were in fact movie stars, so I wanted to write something for them to perform. We had the music before we had the actors and we had the actors before we had the script. So it was very organic, even if it was a very difficult, time-consuming process."

For Daley-Jones, who turns 40 this year, the film has been life changing, not the least because he got to travel outside of Australia for the first time - and to see snow.

"Acting has inspired me and hopefully I will inspire other Nyoongar men," he says of the "mob" around the Perth region, who have been more displaced than the tribes in the north.

"It's hard to fit into society when you're drawn between two cultures. I mean that's my main reason and purpose for being involved with film, so I can try and make a difference. My people are the most important thing to me. I'm a proud Nyoongar man."