Harry Dean Stanton makes final starring appearance in ‘Lucky’ directed by John Carroll Lynch

Atheists do not have the comfort of faith to fall back upon as the inevitable nears, but that does not make them any less afraid of dying. Particularly 90-year-old Lucky (Harry Dean Stanton), the cantankerous Arizonan at the center of the new film “Lucky.”

Actor John Carroll Lynch (“Fargo,” “Turn: Washington Spies,” “The Americans”), makes his directorial debut helming “Lucky,” which was shot in 18 days in and around Los Angeles but for a few location days in the Grand Canyon State.

In an eerie coincidence, Stanton died Sept. 15 at age 91. However, unlike the character Lucky, Mr. Lynch believes that his leading man had long prior come to peace with his own mortality.

“It was my experience that he was ’ready,’ whenever that was going to happen,” Mr. Lynch told The Washington Times during a District tour to promote the film — mere days after Stanton’s passing, as it turned out. “He was ready for whatever was going to come. But Lucky isn’t ready for that. He has to become ready for it. And that interior journey is the story of the movie.”

Despite Stanton’s equanimity with the coming end of his time on Earth, as the director of “Lucky,” Mr. Lynch asked him to “go backwards in time” in order to adequately inhabit the atheist Lucky’s discomfort with facing the void.

“We were asking Harry to go to another point where those fears were bone-level for him,” Mr. Lynch said. “He had to take himself back there, which was not comfortable.”

Mr. Lynch filmed “Lucky” from an original script by Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja. He originally considered acting in his directorial debut as well but found he would better serve the production staying behind the camera.

“If it were a specific kind of part that I was thinking, ’I can’t find somebody to do this part,’ OK,” he said. But “why would I waste any energy trying to put me in it?”

Mr. Lynch has himself been directed by the likes of the Coen brothers, David Fincher and Clint Eastwood. For “Lucky” he even cast another auteur, David Lynch, as Howard, a friend of Lucky’s.

“David was great. He came for Harry Dean because he loved Harry,” Mr. Lynch said of David Lynch. (The two men are not related.)

When asked if David Lynch was ever tempted on the set of “Lucky” to put on his own director’s cap, John Carroll Lynch said the “Twin Peaks” and “Mulholland Drive” filmmaker stayed out of his way to allow the first-time helmer to find his own way.

“There was a moment where Harry was struggling with something, and Harry went, ’Do you understand this, David?’” Mr. Lynch relates. “And David turned to Harry and said, ’It’s not my place to say, Harry.’”

Mr. Lynch was born in Boulder, Colorado, and now lives in upstate New York. However, formative years as a thespian were spent in the nation’s capital at Catholic University, and he later plied his trade on the District’s Arena Stage before moving to Minneapolis, where he was soon cast by native sons Joel and Ethan Coen as Frances McDormand’s husband in “Fargo.” (He had by then perfected the regional accent.)

“I was here for eight years,” Mr. Lynch said of his time acting in Washington, D.C., where he often worked beside the legendary Stanley Anderson, who, by pure coincidence, later portrayed Mr. Lynch’s father on “The Drew Carey Show.”

“Just happenstance — I didn’t recommend him or anything,” Mr. Lynch said of Mr. Anderson, who has also appeared in films like “Primal Fear” and the District-set “Arlington Road.” “He was a huge influence on my work as a theater actor.”

In “Lucky” Mr. Lynch cast such other familiar faces as Ron Livingston (“Sex and the City”), Ed Begley Jr. and even Tom Skerritt, who shares a scene with Stanton, the first time the two men had acted together since “Alien” in 1979.

At the center of it all, however, is Stanton’s Lucky, who ambles about his dusty Arizona town in a state of angst at all left undone and choices perhaps regretted.

“We had a conversation once about this idea that the end of the movie is just a brief period of enlightenment, a golden time for Lucky,” Mr. Lynch said. “Harry said, ’You’re enlightened, right?’ “I said ’I really wouldn’t presume to say, Harry.’ He said, ’How are you going to direct a movie about enlightenment if you’re not enlightened?’”

Whether or not Lucky achieves true transcendence in the film, Mr. Lynch frames Stanton near the end of the piece alone among the Southwest desert, with a hint — just the slightest, subtlest notion — of a Buddha-like joy crossing his face.

Or is it really there?

“He looks at us and it’s so devastating,” Mr. Lynch said of the shot that is all but assuredly going to be incorporated into Stanton’s slot in next year’s Oscar’s “in memoriam.”

“I haven’t seen it since he died, so I don’t know how that’s going to feel watching it,” Mr. Lynch said of the scene. “Even when he did it on the day, I lost it. After 60 years of acting, he looks at ’us.’

“It’s beautiful that, in the limited power of any art, you can keep something of an essence of how he felt at that moment,” Mr. Lynch said of Stanton’s acting. “He wouldn’t say it was ’soul’ because he didn’t believe in it, but he sure was a soulful guy to me.”

While the film may leave some moviegoers disconcerted with its open ending and Lucky’s journey, if not complete, somewhat ambivalent, Mr. Lynch’s movie asks the audience to confront some difficult questions about life and death — and the meaning of it all.

After piloting a film with such a heavy theme, and his leading man now gone, will Mr. Lynch direct again?

“If you’ve been fortunate, as I have, to work with great directors, every one of them that I think of as a master is working on a level where they’re really after the ’why’ of it [rather than] the ’how,’” Mr. Lynch said. “Now as a first-time direction, even with the experience I’ve had as an actor, I’m still in the process of learning the how as well as trying to focus on the why.”

“Lucky” opens Friday in the District.