In his six decades as a working actor, Harry Dean Stanton has never been a showboater or a scene stealer, so it’s perhaps fitting that his final film should serve not only as a showcase for so many of his fellow overlooked veteran character actors, but also as such an understated tribute to the act of simply living.

“Lucky” was originally conceived as a series of vignettes, chronicling the everyday wanderings of its weathered title character, whose life history and modest enthusiasms mirror those of the actor playing him. Like Stanton, Lucky was born in Kentucky, served as a cook in the U.S. Navy during World War II and was on board a tank landing ship during the Battle of Okinawa. But I’ve met Lucky dozens of times in my own life, in small towns and family reunions, and I’ll bet most of you have, too.

MORNING ROUTINE

We’re introduced to Lucky, who lives alone on the outskirts of a rural desert community in the Southwest, as he goes through his morning routine of chain-smoking, yoga exercises and coffee with plenty of milk, all while listening to the Spanish radio station. In these pursuits, as well as his penchant for watching game shows in his underwear, Lucky is very much modeled after Stanton, but he’s also one of a tapestry of folks we meet and greet every day, the ones who are such regulars at the diner and the bar, as Lucky is shown to be, that the waitresses and bartenders know their orders without being told.

The closest the script comes to a turning point is when Lucky suffers from what could be an epileptic seizure, from staring too long at the blinking LED digits of the clock on his coffee maker, which prompts him to visit his doctor, played with patient weariness and gentle sarcasm by Ed Begley Jr. The doctor has little comfort to offer Lucky, ironically enough because his 90-year-old patient has outlived most every preventable medical ailment that could have killed him by now (even his lungs are healthy, in spite of his smoking), which means that the only thing wrong with Lucky is that he’s getting old.

With only a few exceptions, the same could be said of the rest of this film’s cast. Even as Lucky meanders casually through an episodic collection of seemingly isolated moments, they add up thematically to an extended meditation on death, loss, the illusion of permanence and the importance of bonds with others. Although Lucky is the oldest among all his friends, most of them are much closer to the end of their lives than the beginning, and it affects them when events serve to remind them of this.

Beth Grant, whom you've seen before as the fretful and hectoring old woman in everything from “Speed” to “Donnie Darko,” shines in a welcome break from typecasting as a sassy bar owner whose boyfriend, played with his trademark self-effacing charm by James Darren, is still madly in love with her. They’ve found solace in each other, but even they aren’t immune from feeling a bit depressed by Lucky’s conclusion, near the close of the film, that everything eventually gives way to the void.

Since the first film I ever saw Stanton on screen in was Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” it felt a bit like coming full circle for me to see him reunited here with his old “Alien” costar Tom Skerritt, playing a fellow war veteran who reminisces with Lucky over the hardships of combat. Skerritt admits openly to still being haunted by the tragedies he witnessed, even a lifetime later, but while Stanton says nothing in response, his eyes betray his own lingering bad memories.

Director John Carroll Lynch shares not just a last name with “Twin Peaks” co-creator David Lynch, but a fondness for rustic oddballs, without ever condescending to them. These are people with an affinity for simple pleasures, but they are not themselves simple people. Stanton’s Lucky might choose to shrug off philosophical contemplation, but he ultimately proves to be more than capable of it.

Just as Lucky displays hidden depths by performing a pitch-perfect Spanish song at a Mexican-American child’s birthday party, as a thank-you to the boy’s mother for inviting him to the fiesta, so too does John Carroll Lynch manage to wring a moving display of emotion from David Lynch, who retains his natural tone-deaf vocal inflection even as he delivers the most impassioned paean to the nobility of tortoises I’ve ever heard.

Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus wrote a treatise on the myth of Sisyphus, the tragic figure who was condemned by the Greek gods to roll a boulder uphill in Hades forever, by insisting that we must imagine Sisyphus to be happy in his endless labors. When Lucky tells the patrons of the bar that they’re all going to die and that nothing lasts forever, the bar’s owner sheds a tear as she asks how they're supposed to react to that. Lucky’s response? “Smile,” he says, grinning broadly, as he lights up the cigarette that the bar owner had forbidden him to smoke, causing her to burst into laughter.

Because, as Lucky admits, he’s scared too, but while you’re alive, you can still smile. And with a smile as infectious as Stanton’s, it’s hard to leave the theater without doing the same.

Harry Dean Stanton: July 14, 1926 – Sept. 15, 2017.

Leader reporter Kirk Boxleitner is well-known at The Leader for his knowledge of movies – and ability to remember long passages of favorite ones. He writes this column as often as he watches new movies.