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Courtesy of <a href="http://www.sonyclassics.com/atanyprice/#/gallery/">Sony Pictures Classics</a> Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by

oligarchs. Sign up for the free _Mother Jones Daily_. _AT ANY PRICE_ Sony Pictures Classics 105 minutes _At Any Price_, a bleak family drama set against the backdrop of the Corn Belt, is

essentially _Death of a Salesman_, but with genetically modified superseeds. The film is co-written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, who the late critic Roger Ebert dubbed the new “director of

the decade,” soon after seeing Bahrani’s 2007 film _Chop Shop_. _At Any Price _stars Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron (last seen getting peed on by Nicole Kidman in a Lee Daniels art film last

year) as a father and son living their lives of noisy desperation. Quaid plays Henry Whipple (no, not that Henry Whipple), an adulterous farmer and salesman entrenched in the ruthless,

multimillion-dollar rivalry between Iowa’s big-business farmers. Henry becomes the target of a corporate investigation after illegally washing and reselling patented genetically modified

seeds. Efron plays Dean, a local stock car racing champion who dreams of ditching the family business and making a name for himself as a NASCAR driver. The pair’s disenchantment and

bitterness result in a wave of betrayal, anger, and violence in their otherwise peaceful Midwestern town. The film_ _is a quietly disturbing little picture, and features some magnificent

acting, especially by Quaid. The film is not (as Bahrani is quick to point out) in any way political, even though the story prominently involves GMOs, a controversial and extremely political

topic these days. The origin of this apolitical film, however, is indeed rooted in Bahrani’s very political interests. In a conversation I had with Bahrani and Quaid, the 38-year-old

director explained how he went about writing _At Any Price_: > I was curious where my food was coming from. I was reading authors > like Michael Pollan…And I started realizing that 

farms aren’t > romantic places anymore—they’re big businesses. So Michael > Pollan and I became email friends, and I asked him to introduce me > to George Naylor, who’s a farmer in 

Iowa who was featured in > [Pollan’s 2006 book] _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_. So I went out and > I lived with George for many months, and when I went out there, all > the farmers kept 

telling me, “expand or die, get big or get > out.” And I met a seed salesman, [and] I never knew there was such > an occupation as “GMO seed salesman”…And [he] made me think > of_ 

_Arthur Miller’s _Death of a Salesman._ And I thought > combining these things would be a way to tell a human and emotional > story…When you have a lot of race cars and infidelity, 

it’s hard > to be an “agenda film.” (So there you have it: You can thank Michael Pollan for indirectly causing the development of Zac Efron‘s newest movie.) Bahrani pulled from John

Steinbeck, John Ford, and Peter Bogdanovich for narrative and stylistic influences. He also shadowed several Iowa farmers, incorporating their sentiments and commentary into his screenplay.

One day, Bahrani noticed that a customer of one of the farmers owned a stock car for figure 8 racing—an observation he used to craft Efron’s character. “I YouTube’d [figure 8 racing] that

night, and I made a point to keep going to Iowa to go see races,” Bahrani says. “I thought it would be a good contrast [for the two characters]…It had a different pace, and a different

energy, and a different adrenaline.” Dennis Quaid didn’t have time to conduct anything close to this level of research for his role. His learning experiences were all in the midst of

production: “We shot it on a real farm,” Quaid says. “I didn’t have a trailer for this; it was my car or the living-room couch of the Hermans, the family [whose] farm we were shooting on… I

spent my time with them, trying to soak up the atmosphere.” Check out the trailer for this tense and surprising drama: [embedded content] At Any Price _gets a wider release on Friday, May 3.

The film is rated R for sexual content including a strong graphic image, and for language_._ Click here for local showtimes and tickets._ _CLICK HERE FOR MORE MOVIE AND TV COVERAGE FROM

_MOTHER JONES. TO READ_ MORE OF ASAWIN’S REVIEWS, __CLICK HERE_. _TO LISTEN TO THE MOVIE AND POP-CULTURE PODCAST THAT ASAWIN CO-HOSTS WITH_ THINKPROGRESS _CRITIC ALYSSA ROSENBERG, CLICK

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