Much has been written about the very real difficulty of getting obscure or uncommercial films out into the public domain, but even mid-budget pictures from proven directors can be smothered in early infancy.

If there isn't any faith in a film, this will be reflected in the way it's treated by the studio and/or the distributor. Maybe the critics will collude in the film's early demise. Spying a runt of the litter, smelling the whiff of preordained failure, large parts of the media will not give it the same attention afforded to a glossy, well-oiled prestige picture such as Up in the Air.

In this instance, the "runt" to which I'm alluding is Gentlemen Broncos. While never destined to be a hit of Avatar proportions, it had on its side a director with cult appeal (Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess), some recognisable faces with indie cachet (Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords, plus Sam Rockwell and Mike White), and the clout of a distributor, Fox Searchlight Pictures (the "specialist" division of 20th Century Fox), with a proven record of crossover hits including The Full Monty, Little Miss Sunshine and Juno.

But Gentlemen Broncos died on its US release last October. Was it too bizarre? A picture that features three different films-within-a-film, all partly concerning a futuristic warrior's quest for his stolen gonads, could certainly have that charge levelled against it. But the movie -- about a poor, teenage fantasy writer whose submission to a short-story contest is plagiarised by a science-fiction novelist -- is heartfelt, visually arresting (in a Michel Gondry, sticky-backed-plastic kind of way) and rambunctiously funny. An original film, but not an inaccessible one.

It was deemed to have tanked on its opening weekend, when it grossed $31,000 on 12 screens, after which Fox Searchlight drastically scaled back plans to widen its release. If a movie flops in the US, it is as good as dead, and it's unlikely to receive a leg-up from its UK distributor. (The situation can sometimes be reversed if the film is travelling in the opposite direction across the Atlantic, as in the case of Croupier.) And so it was that Fox Searchlight in the UK showed zero enthusiasm for plugging the picture's release here in April.

But then, why wouldn't it? This was only a quickie release, a formality to promote the film's appearance on DVD a few days later. No point spending money pushing a product that it had already decided to bury. Most UK critics responded in kind by throwing their own handfuls of dirt onto the coffin, with the Telegraph and Standard isolated in their praise.

The slapdash treatment didn't stop there. Even with the DVD release date approaching, a critic writing for, ooh, let's say the New Statesman, might find that the PR company responsible for getting the film seen would actively brush off no less than seven requests for a review copy. Fortunately, the might of Fox Searchlight and its appointed PR agents was not omnipotent, and I happened to catch Gentlemen Broncos on a long-haul flight a few weeks back.

If I tell you I watched it twice on the way out, and once on the return leg, and that it has even made me feel I should take another look at Nacho Libre, Hess's previous film, about which I was lukewarm . . . well, what more recommendation do you want?

Gentlemen Broncos is a jubilant, uninhibited film, with a nutty sense of the fantastic and a genuine faith in the transformative power of the imagination. I must mention the genius of Jemaine Clement's performance as the clench-jawed SF legend Dr Ronald Chevalier, an icon of self-important buffoonery to rank alongside Garth Marenghi and Alan Partridge.

Chevalier's writing class, in which he focuses exclusively on the importance of giving the right name to your story's "protag", is already a contender for the most delicious scene of the year, just as Clement himself vies only with Nicolas Cage (in Bad Lieutenant -- Port of Call: New Orleans) for the title of Most Fearlessly Extravagant Comic Turn of 2010.

Also significant is someone who had nothing whatsoever to do with the film's production -- the New Yorker's Richard Brody. Search "Gentlemen Broncos" on the magazine's website and you will turn up 12 blogs, reviews and mentions of the film; all are credited to Brody.

Brody has seemingly devoted most of the past eight months to getting the word out about its brilliance, defending it from its (many) detractors, patiently explaining to them the deeper complexities that have eluded them, and generally refusing to let the movie die as its distributor would wish. He gives critics a good name.