The world is full of fascinating stories, and not all of them have to end with a call to action; some, like the documentary 45365, just help us see the world through someone else’s eyes.

Living in Los Angeles has its benefits. Within walking distance from my apartment are not one, but two indie/revival landmarks. The New Beverly Cinema, recently purchased by Quentin Tarantino, screens hand-picked classics and under-the-radar genre films, often as double-features. A mile down the road, The Silent Movie Theatre serves as home to the Cinefamily, a non-profit organization dedicated to showing strange, wonderful, and overlooked films you’d never see anywhere else. This month, the latter is running a series called What’s Up, Docs? in conjunction with Cinema Eye — whose mission is celebrating the craft of non-fiction film-making.

Recently I had the pleasure of catching one of the nominees for this year’s Cinema Eye Honors: a documentary titled 45365, which you’d be forgiven for not knowing as the zip code for Sidney, Ohio. On hand were the filmmakers, Bill & Turner Ross, as well as AJ Schnack from Cinema Eye.

Both before the film and during the Q&A afterward, AJ made some remarks that were especially noteworthy. He described how part of their goal at Cinema Eye was to reinforce that documentaries aren’t just about exposing scandals or taking a stance on current events. Though he resisted citing examples and denigrating any films of this under-appreciated category, his point was that The Cove or Food, Inc. certainly have their place, but so do non-fiction films without a political agenda. Riveting films like Capturing the Friedmans or Man on Wire deserve just as much fanfare for their great storytelling as do those where film-making overlaps with journalism or editorial opinion.

His comments were reminiscent of a point Ira Glass has also made about This American Life, which Glass himself has described as (and this is paraphrasing) “applying the rigors of journalism to the stories of regular people”. After all, the world is full of fascinating characters and events, and not all of them have to end with a call to action; some just help us see the world through someone else’s eyes.

The comparison is especially apt with 45365. In making their love letter to the town they grew up in, the Ross brothers opted not to follow any individual story arc, instead floating from scene to scene in an unnarrated slice-of-life collage. They give equal attention to small town politics, teen drama, local talk radio, county fairs, cops and criminals and kids. They spend sad, lonely moments with strange old men and listen in on the off-color chatter of funny old women. The result is a sort of tone poem that resembles This American Life’s honest look at the everyday without either endorsing or condescending to its subjects.

What 45365 does better than anything is create a sense of place — and what it feels like to be in that place — and in that regard its willfully obscure title makes sense. The zip code of Sidney, Ohio is an extremely specific designation for the small town they’ve captured so well. But at the same time, this anonymous-seeming five digit code could correspond to any rural county, and the people whose lives we visit could as easily be in Idaho or Iowa or Alabama. 45365 isn’t the story of Sidney, but an encapsulation of the sweet, funny, peculiar and profound moments of small town life. For all of us who’ve grown up and moved on to the big city to find ourselves, it’s a warm feeling to return for these 90 minutes and remember fondly where we came from.

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[Hat tip to Lawrence Everson, friend and sound magician, who worked on the film and brought it to my attention. 45365 is currently playing a limited run at the Downtown Independent in LA, and is very much worth catching while you can. See the official 45365 site for future screenings and cross your fingers it pops up on Netflix or cable if you miss your chance.]