In these days of boutique film festival hype and industry-wide anxiety about the shrinking audience for big-budget Hollywood product, the term “Independent Film” has become both a marketing tool for big studios and a term inept filmmakers use to brand their work with specious relevance.

Nevertheless, the 36th annual New Directors/New Films, a series co-hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, continues to demonstrate a keen curatorial onus in its selection of American independent films. Last year’s festival showcased both Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy” and Ryan Fleck’s “Half Nelson” — two films boasting clear artistic voices unheard in the mainstream and the kind of intelligent and abundant filmmaking craft welcome at any budget level.

This year, one of the strongest entries is “Great World of Sound,” the American director Craig Zobel’s funny, ingenious, and disarmingly compassionate feature debut.

“Great World,” which makes its premiere Friday at MoMA, tells the story of Martin (Pat Healy) and Clarence (Kene Holliday), neophyte traveling salesmen hired to hawk recording contracts to unknown musical acts in the American south. Using open auditions in motel rooms, the two “producers” evaluate all manner of backyard Americana. The music is all over the map, but each audition ends with the same pitch: For a mere $3,000, the musical acts are promised a recording session and all the promotional might that Great World of Sound can bring to bear. Or will they?

Though both men struggle to make themselves believe they are the music business pros they say they are, in reality they are participating in a con game known as song-sharking. As Martin and Clarence get to know their game, each other, their crooked employers, and their gullible marks, “Great World of Sound” uses a very old con to check in on the brazenly narcissistic fame-fixated nature of the American dream.

“In the 1970s this kind of thing was a lot more common,” Mr. Zobel said. “There weren’t iMacs and “Garage Band” and all that sort of stuff.” The director speaks with nearly first-hand experience. His father was briefly involved in a song-sharking con in the 1970s. Song sharks still exist, but, says Mr. Zobel, “they mostly just pursue people in the country music world and in Christian music.”

The performances in “Great World of Sound” run the musical gamut, from country and gospel to heavy metal, hip-hop, singersongwriter folk, and nearly everything in between. Good, bad, and awful, every auditioning hopeful has all of the authentic desperation and zeal of the real thing … because they are the real thing.

“We shot in two chunks,” Mr. Zobel said. “A two-week interview section and a two-week narrative section.” The interview section was conducted in Charlotte, N.C., on a specially designed set accommodating three cameras that were invisible to the audtioners and uninhibiting for Mr. Healy and Mr. Holliday. The intended result was to capture the peculiar personal truth of the old fashioned hard-sell at work.

“I wanted the emotional authenticity of those moments in life when you are dealing with that kind of pressure, like ‘I already said no to you, and yet you’re still bothering me.’ It’s something I’ve felt and it’s a pretty normal human emotion that you never see in a movie.”

The audition scenes in “Great World of Sound” have the palpable suspense of life lived in the moment. Despite being in on what is actually happening and having an additional responsibility to direct the nonactors to move and sit where the cameras can see them, Messrs. Healy and Holliday vanish into the anxiety and bluster of their characters’ good cop, bad cop salesmanship.

Mr. Healy points out that the elaborate staging was the antithesis of reality TV exploitation.” It’s not a gimmick,” he said of the unique setup. “It’s really just another tool to tell a narrative, a way to get natural performances out of people.”

Unlike “Borat,” for which the filmmakers shot, extracted vague legal clearances from their unwitting marks, and moved on without explanation, the “Great World of Sound” team “talked to everyone immediately after we shot with them,” Mr. Healy says, “to be sure that they were cool with it.”

The two actors’ tightrope walk between movie reality and physical reality was another blessing in disguise. “We are an odd couple,” Mr. Healy said of his co-star. “Kene’s a 56-year-old black man who grew up pretty rough, and I’m a 35-year-old white guy who grew up in the suburbs. Our relationship in the movie, the way it develops, was really the way our relationship in real life developed. It’s really the best possible world from an actor’s perspective.”

Though “Great World of Sound” is Mr. Healy’s first leading movie role, he is a working actor with a long list of film and television credits. Mr. Holliday’s resume stretches back into the late 1960s.

“When you work with some of the actors that I’ve worked with in TV,” Mr. Healy said, “you look them in the eye and they’re not the character. They’re just lying. It was so nice to get in a film with a guy who’s been acting 35 years or more and who looks you in the eye and he’s there — he’s that character, you know? He wasn’t lying.”

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