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(l-r) Jon Bass as Nathaniel, Marc Maron as Mel, Michaela Watkins as Mary and Jillian Bell as Cynthia in Lynn Shelton’s Sword Of Trust. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films release.

There’s a sword but not much trust at the start of Lynn Shelton’s oddball indie comedy Sword Of Trust but it does have comic surprises and a lot to say about how appearances can be deceiving and the dangers of assumptions and stereotyping. And, yes, trust becomes a central factor in this tale of conspiracy theorists and strangers joining forces.

A curmudgeonly pawnshop owner named Mel (Marc Maron) and his nearly-useless, web-surfing employee Nathaniel (Jon Bass) are eking out a thin living in a small Southern town, but Mel find an unexpected opportunity when out-of-towners Cynthia (Jillian Bell) and her wife Mary (Michaela Watkins) stroll in hoping to sell a Civil War-era sword. Mary was...

If ever there were a movie for our era, it is surely Lynn Shelton’s deceptively low-fi comedy “Sword of Trust,” which cheerfully skewers its targets even as it sweetly wears its heart on its sleeve.

The movie premiered at SXSW, and it’s safe to say Shelton is preaching to a pretty well-defined choir. If you connect to her liberal heroes, you’ll probably love the movie. If you favor her Maga-fied villains, you’re more likely to write nasty comments about her on Twitter. Given that she’s thought out every other aspect of the project with acerbic intelligence, one suspects she’s prepared for this schism, too.

The divide that cleaves America is, after all, the film’s foundation. And its locus is a grungy corner of Birmingham, Alabama, where Mel (comedian/podcaster Marc Maron) — a wisecracking Jewish blues musician from New Mexico — runs a sleepy pawnshop...

There’s a point in Lynn Shelton’s Sword of Trust where the four principal characters are being led into a situation with as much chance of ending in their death as it does the payment of forty thousand dollars. Sitting there in that moment of uncertainty without any bearing as to where they were or where they were going, Mel (Marc Maron) can’t help but smile and revel in the fact that he’s about to see something so wild he can’t wrap his head around it being true. He’s going to see a bunch of people who have warped their minds to the point of believing the Confederate army actually won the Civil War. The answer to “How can people think like this?” would soon be his either way.

I’m not saying he thinks the answer is worth dying for, but that excitement and...