HEARTACHE, PICKUP TRUCKS, EXES AND BORSCHT.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

WHAT ON EARTH do communism and the Nashville music machine have in common? Two things, believe it or not. Neither function very well, and both contributed to the creation of Bering Strait, a Grammy-nominated country band comprising seven talented young people from the drab, quarantined-under-the-Soviets science center of Obninsk, Russia.

If this sounds like a joke, well, it has been before - Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki made a couple of poker-faced satirical films about a tone-deaf rockabilly outfit called the Leningrad Cowboys a decade back. But ``The Ballad of Bering Strait'' is a straightforward documentary about a real bunch of Russian pickers - originally four boys and two girls, with a replacement bassist who came along later - who were organized by their local music teacher into a kid bluegrass outfit during the early days of the postcommunist opening to all things Western (and, in their case, country).

By the late 1990s, most of the Berings had undergone serious Moscow music schooling (there's one great scene of banjo player Ilya performing ``Foggy Mountain Breakdown'' for uncomprehending but amused conservatory instructors). But since they'd never amount to more than a novelty act in the Motherland, the kids headed for Tennessee, where with good fortune that eludes most Americans they found a nurturing, virtually self-sacrificing manager, Mike Kinnamon, and landed a major label contract.

And there their troubles began. Despite the beat-all-odds support of some respected Nashville power brokers, Bering Strait hit Music City just as country music entered a disastrous sales downturn. Over the course of three years, the band signed to two companies that went under before releasing their album.

Unable to work at even subsistence jobs due to their visa restrictions, the kids fret and loll around Kinnamon's isolated farm, which one notes has only three horses and a donkey to provide distraction.

This is by far the most interesting stretch of the film, which was shot on very good, high-definition digital equipment by director Nina Gilden Seavey, who runs George Washington University's Documentary Center.

These kids are so uniformly nice, talented, smart, hard-working and dedicated to their artistic path that you kind of wonder what they're doing in a music genre that's all about dysfunction, pain and stupid self-destructiveness. Sure, some of them express a traditional country longing for the folks back home. But if any of the Berings had sex lives, inner demons or even a bad thought about anybody else, you'd never know it from what Seavey chooses to show us.

Also a little odd is the way the group's two females, songwriter and lead vocalist Natasha Borzilova and keyboardist/harmony singer Lydia Salnikova, are given much more camera time and background exposure than any of the guys. Both young women are articulate, insightful and forthcoming, which perhaps the fellas were not. What we do hear from the other musicians, however, indicates that they're no less intelligent or charismatic, which just makes the uneven spread of attention feel like more of a mistake.

As for Bering Strait's music, well, it's good technically, rather pat lyrically and corporate Nashville overall. They do put across more authentic-sounding twang than Shania or Faith ever will, and the girls work some very impressive harmonies. But as one listener who calls in after a radio test play hilariously puts it, ``They sound like Yankees.''

Of course, looked at another way, could the end of the Cold War have resulted in anything more cross-culturally beguiling?

THE BALLAD OF BERING STRAIT - Two and one half stars

(Not rated)

Director: Nina Gilden Seavey.

Running time: 1 hr. 38 min.

Playing: Sunset 5, West Hollywood.

In a nutshell: Documentary about Russian teenage country musicians struggling to make it in Nashville could've used more personal material.