Like Lone Star or City of Hope, the title of Sunshine State evokes both a concrete place and a metaphysical abstraction, which is to say it’s partly about a real place, and partly about all of them. Sunshine State, the latest location-centered ensemble drama from John Sayles (who has pretty much begun to make a career of these sorts of things), has the feel of something inspired by real places, even if you don’t know, for example, that State’s “Buccaneer Days,” a Floridian tourist island’s ersatz holiday celebrating the life of a notorious seadog, is drawn directly from a similar event in Tampa, a festival organized around the life of a pirate who, Sayles notes ruefully, “probably didn’t exist.” Sayles doesn’t claim to be representing history per se -- Lone Star closed with the directive “Forget the Alamo” -- but he’s gone after what might be called meta-history. It’s the difference between the way things happened, and the way they happen.

As in Lone Star or Limbo, history --personal and social -- is a pressing concern for the residents of Delrona, whether it's a past they've fled or want to flee, or the matter of developers setting their sights on what was once a prosperous and thriving black sub-community, splintered and all but destroyed since desegregation removed its unique appeal. At the same time, as a tourist town, they're dependent on history, or at least a bogus version thereof, for their livelihoods.

"There's good reasons people want to cut history loose," Sayles says by phone from a stop in Pittsburgh. "One nice thing about this country is we're not stuck in our history. It's not, ŒYou're born to this class and you'll die in this class and that's all there is to it. That mobility is a very attractive thing about American life. On the other hand, you also end up chucking away things that might be valuable when you can just change yourself so quickly. The story of assimilation in America is you have to give up something to become an American, something of who you used to be, and some valuable stuff may get thrown away in addition to your poverty."

Sunshine State obviously touches on concerns raised in previous Sayles movies -- Lone Star's exploration of history as battleground, Limbo's portrait of a place where everyone is running from who they were somewhere else -- but its emphasis on re-creation, where history is not hidden but, in the words of one of the movie's developers, "Disneyf[ied]," is a new wrinkle. From Edie Falco's frustrated motel owner, who took a brief shot at show biz before falling back into her father's career, to Angela Bassett's mid-level actress, who fled teenage scandal but is remembered as the star of late-night infomercials, Delrona's residents have tried to convince themselves that the past is dead, but the paint keeps peeling off their manufactured present. The people in a tourist town, Sayles says, "aren't creating a product, they're not manufacturing something -- they're selling themselves, and their history and their land. And a lot of the time, they're doing something just so that tourists can see them do it. At Universal Studios in Orlando, they don't always have a real movie shooting there, but because it's part of the tour, they hire some people to pretend to be shooting a scene from a movie. If you're an unemployed gaffer, you might get a job pretending to be a gaffer, but everybody but the people coming through the door knows there's no film in the camera."

Sunshine State's almost ragged visual style, a marked departure from the glossy look of Sayles' recent movies, represents a conscious choice to avoid beer-commercial depictions of the Florida coast. "The light down there doesn't look like a commercial. It's hard. The shadows are harsher. I was not trying to do something that's luscious and beautiful. I was trying to do something about the workers who work on those beaches, not the people who put on suntan lotion and try to get a good tan. There's no tanning in the movie. You find a lot of people who live in Florida, they rush across that parking lot as quick as they can and get back in the air conditioning."

So why the need to prettify? One answer, Sayles says, is that "most history is people killing other people over real estate. That's not the noblest of motives, so you have to say, ŒLet's find a story that tells us what a wonderful thing we did.'" In the process, though, a number of side myths are created as well, some of which are, on examination, singularly bizarre. "Why are we celebrating pirates?" he asks incredulously. "They were sort of these seagoing biker gangs, rapists, murderers, slavers. Somehow they've gotten cute."