The Brothers McMullen.

It is easy to overpraise The Brothers McMullen, a modest, ordinary movie whose virtues are mostly negative. It was made for little more than $20,000 by the 27-year-old Edward Burns. To save money, he cast himself as one of the leads, on top of writing and directing; he used friends, family, and his family's house on Long Island for actors and locations. The movie was shot in 16 mm. and blown up; most negative virtue of all: it won the top prize at the contemptible Sundance Festival. It deals with the lives of three working-class Irish Catholic brothers in an unfashionable part of the Island, which sets it off from other movies; the most exotic The Brothers McMullen gets is to shoot a scene on the subway.

The brothers are Jack, the eldest, married to the decent Molly, who feels it's high time for a baby even as Jack is reluctantly -- but not all that reluctantly -- drawn into an affair with the flashily independent Ann, a cast-off girlfriend of Barry, the middle brother. An aspiring filmmaker (did I hear anyone whisper 'Autobiography'?), Barry drops girls at their mere mention of a second date, and instructs his younger brother, Patrick, in strategies of noncommitment. Patrick, equally obsessed with women and the prohibitions of Catholicism, is torn between Susan, a rich Jewish girl who wants him to convert to Judaism, marry her, and work for her father's clothing business; and Leslie, a free spirit determined to head West, and not uneager to share the adventure with the vacillating Patrick.

Then there is the romance between Barry and Audry, a young would-be actress he keeps bumping into in the Village in the cutest ways this side of A Walk in the Clouds, and who, much to his discomfiture, keeps growing on him even after she stops rejecting his advances. Though Burns gives nearly equal time to each of the brothers, the interest gravitates to the Audry - Barry episodes, largely because their interpreters are the most charismatic. Burns himself is handsome, easy-going, and loved by the camera. As Audry, Burns's real-life girlfriend of five years' standing, Maxine Bahns, is adorable, overcoming a slight amateurishness with a charming mixture of spunk and vulnerability.

Lest we assume that everything here is autobiographical, the brothers' late father is made out to have been a swine -- whereas the real-life Burns Sr. was the executive producer of the movie. Except for the opening scene in a cemetery after old McMullen's funeral (unseen, because too costly to stage), where the liberated widow takes off there and then to join her true love in Ireland, the movie tends to ring true, and is intermittently amusing. But triteness can wear a blue collar as easily as a white one, and spout Catholicism as cheerfully as agnosticism or the gospel according to Spike Lee. The test will be what Burns can do with his next feature, with a real budget and without the autobiographical indulgences of the first.