Sundance Film Festival

Those half-frozen girls and I finally got seats, Sigismondi came teetering out on her eight-foot, fashion-vixen legs to say hello, and Stewart and the real-life Jett, both of them teeny-tiny, waved to the crowd and set a thousand iPhones and Flipcams whirring. Eventually it was time for the movie, and while I wouldn’t call it a letdown — Sigismondi shoots with style to burn, and the costumes, sets and hair are all meticulously, artfully correct — you don’t actually need me to tell you the story. Kids from busted homes start a rock band, meet a sleazy-genius manager, become too famous too fast, do a bunch of drugs and make some bad decisions, see the whole thing come crashing down. (Repeat as desired.)

Yes, of course there was one crucial difference between the Runaways and just about every other mid-’70s band, and that difference changed rock history, 20 years or so before the riot-grrrl meme. I think Sigismondi gets that aspect of the story just about right. Creating an all-girl band that actually rocked, and whose members would strut the stage like the Stones or Aerosmith, was the joint inspiration of Jett and producer-manager Kim Fowley (played with delicious, scenery-chewing abandon by Michael Shannon). They needed no grasp of feminist theory to understand that things were changing in mid-1970s America, and that an all-female band that actually rocked hard, and wasn’t a transparent cheesecake gimmick, could hit the big time virtually overnight.

While the original idea was Jett’s, it was Fowley who decided the band needed a hot blonde lead singer, and who picked a glam-rock teenager named Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) out of the crowd in a Hollywood nightclub. Interestingly, of the two front Runaways, it’s Fanning’s haunting performance as the ambivalent, damaged Currie that anchors the film. I don’t know if the real-life Jett’s involvement with the production complicated matters for the filmmakers, but Stewart’s Jett remains a hooded figure, a tomboy rock ‘n’ roll cipher. We learn nothing about her family life, and the question of her sexuality and her relationship with Currie is veiled with hints and allusions.

I’m not sure that’s exactly a criticism. We have no inherent right to the details of Jett’s personal life, and I certainly don’t think that probing psychological realism is the only way to tell a living person’s story. It’s more that Sigismondi has made a straightforward rock ‘n’ roll biopic that’s fluid and exciting to watch, but clearly aspires to something more. It aspires, in fact, to the mind-blowing power that “Cherry Bomb” wielded over a distinctive subset of adolescents 35 years ago. Sometimes mind-blowing power isn’t available, and a rollercoaster ride of stardom and depravity will just have to do.

Elusive British street artist Banksy is in Park City this week — as the trompe l’oeil murals appearing around town attest — but of course he did not reveal himself at the premiere of his first film “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” another hot ticket this weekend. It’s not exactly a movie about his own endlessly imaginative work — which has included hanging his own paintings in the Tate Gallery and bending a London phone booth in half — nor is it exactly about the ambiguous “street art” movement that has bridged the gap between graffiti tagging and the gallery world.

Well, it’s a little bit about those things, enough to offer newcomers a primer in both subjects. But Banksy’s inventive and genial film, narrated by Rhys Ifans in plummy, self-mocking documentary-narrator tones, is really about how he half-accidentally helped a strange little French guy in L.A., a vintage-clothing entrepreneur named Thierry Guetta, become Mr. Brainwash, an overnight sensation (and flashpoint of controversy) in the contemporary art world.

There’s a real danger here of falling into the traps set by a professional prankster like Banksy — some conspiracy theorists have suggested that Mr. Brainwash is entirely Banksy’s invention — but for the moment I’m taking “Exit Through the Gift Shop” mostly at face value. It’s a rueful, comic exploration of what happens when artists like Banksy and his friend Shepard Fairey, who’ve set themselves up as opponents of the pretentious, big-money art establishment, see their own weapons used against them.

Despite their rebel, street-artist status, Banksy and Fairey cling to relatively old-fashioned ideas about craft, training and vision, and the explosion of somebody like Mr. Brainwash — who has no artistic training or ability, little knowledge of art history and a miscellaneous aesthetic cobbled together from every prominent pop or street artist since Andy Warhol — calls all that into question. As Banksy’s London dealer muses late in the film, “Good for Thierry if he can pull it off. At the same time, the joke’s on … well, I’m not sure who the joke’s on. I’m not even sure there is a joke.”

Sticking with inscrutable British phenomena, something like Chris Morris’ “Four Lions” is utterly unimaginable in America. Morris studied the cases of homegrown British Muslim terrorists with real or imagined links to al-Qaida, and turned the results into a very dark slapstick farce about a group of lovable but incompetent morons devoted to the task of launching jihad in the industrial north of England. Yes, it’s “In the Loop” meets “Paradise Now,” and Morris dishes out the ruthless satire in all directions: The hardass white Muslim convert, the wholesome Pakistani immigrants, the devout mosque-goers, the inept police, the studiously liberal British politicians — they’re all criminal-grade idiots.

You’ll laugh uproariously at what seems like a nihilistic but good-humored film, until you realize that Morris isn’t actually kidding about any of it, and that where “Four Lions” is going isn’t funny at all. I don’t think this is the near-masterpiece some Sundance critics have proclaimed it, and it’s pretty hard to imagine an American audience of any size tolerating this film. But it’s a first-rate example of the self-lacerating, take-no-prisoners current in British comedy. (Watch a clip here.)

Stephen Frears’ “Lay the Favorite,” with Bruce Willis and Rebecca Hall, is a lightweight sub-Hollywood farce; Julie Delpy’s “2 Days in New York,” starring herself and Chris Rock, is a halfway agreeable mess; Nicholas Jarecki’s “Arbitrage,” with Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon, is a decent corporate-world thriller. And while I’m delighted to defend Spike Lee’s “Red Hook Summer,” it’s a rough and rugged ultra-indie production that disappointed many viewers. If none of those films is life-changing, none is even half as bad as Rodrigo Cortés’ “Red Lights,” a moronic paranormal mystery featuring the latest dispiriting Robert De Niro performance.

That wasn’t where the action was at Sundance 2012; indeed, in this downsized era I suspect that the festival’s customary mode of programming around a handful of star-studded, audience-friendly premiere screenings doesn’t work anymore. By the end of the week, festival director John Cooper looked a bit fretful introducing those big Eccles screenings, as if realizing he was about to underwhelm a thousand strangers. On the other hand, this was an exciting festival for documentaries and more challenging dramatic fare, and quite a few of this year’s movies have been picked up for distribution, mostly at discount prices. (With one major exception: Ben Lewin’s “The Surrogate,” a would-be Oscar contender starring John Hawkes and Helen Hunt that I haven’t seen yet.)

Sundance will award its own proliferation of prizes this weekend, and honestly there are so damn many of them they don’t have much impact. So what should you be looking forward to seeing over the next several months? In keeping with past years, I’m awarding my own much-coveted grand prizes, just one each in the narrative and documentary categories, along with a list of five more especially hot titles to watch for in each division. Please note that the normal level of subjectivity is exaggerated here by an epic level of entropy and randomness — I could make an alternate list of Sundance movies I heard were terrific and haven’t yet seen. (That list might start with Rick Alverson’s Brooklyn-hipster satire “The Comedy,” which isn’t exactly a comedy, Alison Klayman’s documentary about the most prominent dissident Chinese artist, “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” and the LCD Soundsystem concert doc “Shut Up and Play the Hits.”)

If Sundance 2012 produced few obvious box-office hits and awards contenders, it strikes me as an important year of transition, with lots of movies that got people arguing and should keep on doing so. Times of turmoil and crisis, after all, tend to produce the most exciting art. If they also produce unintentionally hilarious movies in which Robert De Niro plays a blind, self-levitating psychic (“Do you doubt my powers? DO YOU DOUBT MY POWERS?”), I guess we’ll live with that.

NARRATIVE GRAND PRIZE: “Keep the Lights On”

I’ve already reviewed this breakthrough work from New York indie-film veteran Ira Sachs, which is both a fearless autobiographical examination of a drug-fueled long-term relationship and a delicate, almost anthropological examination of American gay life at the turn of the millennium. I fervently hope that “Keep the Lights On” can reach beyond the traditional limitations of the gay-cinema audience (which is pretty large, to be fair), because it’s a beautifully made American film anchored in a mesmerizing central performance by Danish actor Thure Lindhardt, who’s now ready for his crossover moment.

FIVE MORE TO WATCH

Kirsten Dunst unleashes her inner bitch as the supremely mean protagonist of writer-director Leslye Headland’s “Bachelorette,” an exceptionally smart character drama masquerading as “Bridesmaids”-style raunch. Lizzy Caplan, Isla Fisher and Rebel Wilson — playing the overweight bride formerly known as “Pig Face” — round out the superb, female-centric cast. This movie will play even better in big cities than it did at Sundance.

I will admit that I’ve only seen the trailer for New York-to-New Orleans transplant Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” — I kept passing it up for another mediocre, semi-mainstream comedy — so I have no idea whether I’ll personally like it. But this allegorical, apocalyptic fable about a 6-year-old girl’s odyssey through the hallucinatory swamplands of southern Louisiana still belongs on the list, since it played to nearly universal acclaim and was clearly the biggest surprise in the entire festival lineup. (It was acquired for release by Fox Searchlight.)

Screenings of Craig Zobel’s claustrophobic “Compliance,” which is based on a real-life case in which a prank caller masquerading as a cop convinced a fast-food manager to detain and abuse an employee, turned into a participatory sport. Some viewers accused Zobel and his cast of exploiting the episode or inflicting more abuse on both the cast and the audience, while others leapt in to defend him. I’ll discuss my reservations and convoluted response some other time; suffice it to say you should decide for yourself.

As personally instructed by Spike Lee, I’ve already told readers that “Red Hook Summer” is not a sequel to “Do the Right Thing.” But to my taste, Lee’s journey back to the streets of Brooklyn — and to low-budget production values — produces his most heartfelt picture in years. This shaggy-dog, discursive fable of an Atlanta boy sent to spend the summer with his preacher granddad (the terrific Clarke Peters) may be flawed on various technical levels, but it’s a passionate and painful tribute to black Brooklyn, black America and the black church that will resonate with many viewers and profoundly irritate many others.

Speaking of irritation, I’ve already aired my grievances about Antonio Campos’ “Simon Killer,” a marvelously crafted Parisian nightmare starring Brady Corbet as a Yank drifter who falls in love with a hooker (French actress and filmmaker Mati Diop, simultaneously vulnerable and tough as nails). But I have to admit that “Simon Killer” stuck with me, visually and thematically and emotionally, through a whole week of watching other people’s movies. Like it or hate it, it confirms Campos’ status as an extraordinary talent who’s doing it his way.

DOCUMENTARY GRAND PRIZE: “Detropia”

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the documentary dynamic duo behind “Jesus Camp” and the powerful abortion film “12th & Delaware,” have created an elegy to the Motor City that transcends statistics and sociology and reaches closer to poetry. With a population that has shrunk by more than half in 50 years, and almost 40 square miles of empty land inside the city limits, Detroit is the test case of America’s deindustrialization, and a laboratory for what might come next. “Detropia” isn’t a social-issue film and doesn’t advocate for particular policies; rather, it’s a gorgeous and tragic tribute to the immense symbolic power of Detroit and to the people who still live there.

FIVE MORE TO WATCH

Both inspirational and tragic, David France’s “How to Survive a Plague” is more than another testimonial to the worst years of the AIDS epidemic (although if you lived through that period in New York, the evocation is immensely powerful). France specifically tracks how the activist movements ACT UP and TAG — primarily composed of sick and dying gay men — worked to force science, business and government to pay attention to them, and ultimately became insiders who helped drive innovative discoveries that transformed HIV infection into a manageable disorder. As the film makes clear, this wasn’t just about AIDS and gay people, but a wide-ripple political movement that permanently reoriented the relationship between those in power, sick people and their advocates.

If your immediate response to the idea of a movie about the controversial performance and installation artist Marina Abramović — and her plan to sit at a table in the Museum of Modern Art all day, every day, for three months — is to snort with derision, then you’re completely ready for Matthew Akers’ documentary “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present.” More than a retrospective portrait of an eclectic art-world pioneer and her influential work and ideas, Akers’ film is also a moving and masterfully constructed exploration of what makes art — or anything else — worth doing in the first place.

Making a film about an idea, rather than a political issue or a specific historical incident, is devilishly difficult, but the ingenious Canadian documentarian Jennifer Baichwal (“Manufactured Landscapes”) pulls it off in “Payback,” which explores the concept of debt through many of its juridical, environmental and moral ramifications. Baichwal bounces from an essay by Margaret Atwood through a blood feud in rural Albania, a remorseful Canadian prison inmate, the disgraceful conditions faced by immigrant tomato pickers in Florida and numerous other people and places — and if the combination feels ungainly at first, it’s ultimately haunting, beautiful and strangely optimistic.

Photojournalist turned filmmaker Lauren Greenfield turned an assignment to shoot a couple who were building the largest house in America into the hilarious and upsetting film “The Queen of Versailles,” which played on opening night at Sundance. You can’t feel too bad about Florida time-share king David Siegel, whose collapsing empire has left the couple’s 90,000-square-foot MegaMcMansion sitting unfinished in the swamp, but his likable wife, Jacki — she of the modest middle-class background and extensive cosmetic surgery — becomes the heroine of an intensely symbolic Recession-era saga that feels like an updated Russian novel on steroids. (I do blame Jacki for the pet lizard, though.)

While Rodney Ascher’s profoundly strange “Room 237″ will no doubt appeal most to film critics and other hardcore movie buffs, it was an absolute sensation at Sundance and could easily inspire a widespread cult following. (Especially because it may prove to be unreleasable in theatrical form.) As 1.3 percent of you will already have figured out, this is a movie about another movie — Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” — and the outrageous, often demented conspiracy theories that have sprung up around that misunderstood masterpiece and/or overcooked horror farrago. (You take your pick.) Composed principally of copyright-challenging clips from “The Shining ” and numerous other Kubrick movies, this is an ingenious trip down the rabbit hole into the alternate universe of movie-geek paranoia, some of which — I’m not telling! — may just be borderline not-crazy.

That’s quite an introduction to a character, especially considering that Erik is evidently based on Sachs himself, an indie-film stalwart best known for the 2005 Sundance prizewinner “Forty Shades of Blue.” Sachs has made no secret of the fact that “Keep the Lights On,” the story of a long-running and tormented relationship, is drawn from his own life. (His ex-boyfriend is well known in the New York publishing world.) But this isn’t an excuse to issue apologias or vent personal grudges; it’s a loving but entirely fearless portrait of gay urban life at the turn of the millennium, seen through the prism of one dysfunctional love affair. In fact, this movie may test how far the gay community has come on issues of self-representation. While it seems unlikely that bigots and homophobes would actively seek this film out (except, you know, on the sly and stuff), any who do see it could certainly cherry-pick details to support the thesis that Erik’s entire cadre of humanity are degenerates.

As seen over the course of an on-and-off decade together, Erik and his boyfriend Paul (Zachary Booth) — a lawyer who is at first closeted, with a girlfriend — drift in and out of substance abuse, compulsive promiscuity and at least the outer margins of mental illness. Paul has a habit of disappearing for days or weeks on crack benders; on one such occasion, Erik tracks him down in a midtown Manhattan hotel room and holds Paul’s hand while he has sex with a male prostitute. (As I said earlier, there’s no full-frontal nudity in this film, but Sachs is frank about the messy realities of man-on-man sex in a way rarely or never seen on-screen before.)

I should save a full review of Sachs’ magnum opus (and that’s what it is) for a later occasion. But let me assure you that whatever else “Keep the Lights On” may be — scathing self-portrait, old-school NYC independent film (shot on super 16, not HD video!), showcase for two marvelously liberated performances — it’s absolutely not a freak show. Erik and Paul are complicated, confidently realized creations, and there’s plenty of human commonality to be found in their relationship, no matter what gender you are or whom you go to bed with. But Sachs has clearly decided that there’s no point in pretending that gay society and sexuality aren’t distinctive in many ways. (I’m a great admirer of Lisa Cholodenko and “The Kids Are All Right,” for instance, but that’s a movie predicated on the idea that gay marriage is fundamentally not different from the heterosexual variety.)

Like Andrew Haigh’s “Weekend,” another recent film that feels like a step forward or a step away from the “queer cinema” of the ’90s, this isn’t a movie about identity or coming out or facing oppression. It’s an unstinting relationship drama — perhaps consciously modeled on Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage” — about two guys who fall in love in the most tolerant and diverse metropolis in America, surrounded by supportive gay and straight friends, and manage to screw it all up with drugs and craziness and horndoggery. You could choose to interpret the movie as being about how people like Paul and Erik are ghettoized by an uncaring, heterocentric society or whatever, but frankly there’s nothing like that in the film. (One way to understand the title, as Sachs explained after the screening I attended here, is as a commitment to revealing everything and hiding nothing.)

Beautifully shot by Thimios Bakatakis, with songs by underground New York musical legend Arthur Russell (who died of AIDS in 1992), “Keep the Lights On” is an instant landmark in gay cinema, and easily the finest dramatic film I saw at Sundance this year. (Possibly that’s damning with faint praise — but it’s still good!) Not only does this film gloriously fulfill the potential that Ira Sachs has tantalized movie-lovers with for years, it also help explains what took him so long. Out of lost love comes a terrific work of art; it’s the oldest story in the world, but it always feels new when it’s done right.

Mind you, “Declaration of War” still is a profoundly affecting family drama, no matter how much artifice Donzelli piles on top of it. If you’re a parent of young children (as I am), you’ll have to use your own judgment about how much you can take. I understand why some people respond to the health catastrophes of other people’s kids by shutting them out, as if the bad juju might be infectious. That’s how the young father in the film (Jérémie Elkaïm, who is or was Donzelli’s real-life partner, and co-wrote the screenplay) reacts when another kid in their son’s hospital ward dies: Geez, that’s too bad; let’s move on. Let’s face it, every parent harbors these fears, and every time you’re waiting for a phone call from the doctor – even if it’s about allergy testing, or a strep-throat culture – you secretly prepare for the worst.

Although the story of “Declaration of War” apparently hews closely to the real-life saga that Donzelli and Elkaïm endured along with their son, Donzelli kicks it up to a mythic and slightly surreal level right away. When their two characters first meet, and click erotically, against the pounding dance-pop of a Parisian nightclub, they discover that their names are Roméo (Elkaïm) and Juliette (Donzelli). “Does this mean we’ll have a love story with a tragic ending?” he murmurs in her ear. You can view that choice as daring or way too precious; I kind of think it’s both, but by that point I had already been sucked in by the visual and auditory undertow of Donzelli’s style, and just went for the ride. (Full credit also to the spectacular cinematography of Sébastien Buchmann.)

Almost as soon as their son is born, Roméo and Juliette half-suspect something is wrong: He cries all the time, wants to feed constantly, and won’t let them get any sleep. (I would point out that most parents, especially first-time parents, go through some version of that.) But when Adam is 18 months old (and still not walking), their pediatrician notices an odd asymmetry to his facial expressions, and sends them for a neurological consultation and then a CAT scan and then an MRI. The results are pretty nearly as bad as they could be: Adam has a large tumor compressing his brain stem, which will require immediate surgery. And without giving away the whole story, the news doesn’t get any better after that.

That’s the story, and perhaps as an act of catharsis, Donzelli has chosen to tell it as a gorgeous, stylized and highly sensual motion picture. Both she and Elkaïm are gorgeous physical specimens and vividly kinetic performers, and “Declaration of War” finds delight in the most unlikely moments: Juliette sprinting down hospital corridors at high speed, as her son is being anesthetized for his MRI; the two parents riding a fairground Ferris wheel like teenage lovers, at a point when they’ve sold their apartment and quit their jobs to move into the hospital’s parents’ wing. They’re surrounded by a constellation of supporting characters who come together, Greek chorus-style, to support their struggle: Roméo’s working-class mom and her female partner, Juliette’s more bourgeois siblings and parents.

I recognize that the whole thing sounds self-indulgent, and may be so — playing a version of yourself in the arted-up story of your own child’s life-or-death battle with cancer. But the breadth and brio of “Declaration of War” are such that I never tried to resist, and I honestly believe any parent can identify with the ways Donzelli turns quotidian details – a drive to the train station, or a ringing phone at the dinner hour – into thriller-worthy moments of intense drama. Among other things, this movie is a comic and tragic exploration of contemporary European family values, one that makes clear how much is lost, and how much gained, when people are forced to face a crisis of this magnitude.

I’ll drop a big hint and say that while the ending of “Declaration of War” is heartbreaking in various ways, you don’t have to fear the most downbeat or tragic conclusion. (Donzelli and Elkaïm’s real-life son, Gabriel, appears in the film.) Instead, this is a story about two pampered young Parisians who had to grow up in one hell of a hurry and deal with something dreadful, and who were fortunate enough to live in an affluent Western country that still, even in straitened economic times, views healthcare as a right and not a privilege. (Yeah, hint, hint.) So they confronted every parent’s worst nightmare and made it through, more or less, without losing their passion for wine, sex, vigorous exercise and cheesy French love songs.

“Declaration of War” opens this week in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, with wider national release to follow. It will also be available on-demand nationwide through many cable and satellite providers, beginning Feb. 3.

Fans of Delpy’s zany 2007 relationship comedy “2 Days in Paris” will already have a good idea what to expect here, but it really doesn’t matter whether you’ve seen the earlier movie. Jack, the American boyfriend played by Adam Goldberg in “2 Days in Paris,” has evidently moved on (leaving behind a young son), and Delpy’s character, Marion, is now shacking up with a Village Voice journalist and radio host named Mingus, who has a daughter of his own. (Rock even says the character is based on the prominent African-American journalists Nelson George and Elvis Mitchell.)

Rock gets some decent laugh lines, but he isn’t doing improv or stand-up material here – although he does deliver two monologues to a cardboard cutout of Barack Obama. The film’s principal source of comedy is the Franco-American cultural clash that ensues when Marion’s father (played again by Albert Delpy, her real father and a veteran French stage actor), her compulsively flirtatious sister (Alexia Landeau) and her sister’s wannabe-black boyfriend (Alexandre Nahon) all descend upon Marion and Mingus’ modest Manhattan apartment. Once again, Delpy, who co-wrote the screenplay with Landeau and Nahon, specializes in an awkward, almost abrasive comedy that pushes her characters and the central relationship to the edge of collapse, before pulling back for the requisite happy ending.

I sat down with Delpy and Rock for a few minutes in a Park City café, the day after the Sundance premiere of “2 Days in New York.” In an earlier conversation, Rock had said he was eager to push into strong dramatic roles. “I think you have to do something strong if people are used to seeing you be funny. I’d have to do something where I was a killer, or a transvestite. A transvestite killer, maybe. Something where I get to really act.”

You know what’s funny in your movie? Well, a lot of things. But the fact that when Alexandre Nahon’s character is trying to impress you, Chris, the only thing from black culture he can come up with is Salt ‘n Pepa. I’m not even sure why that’s funny, but it is.

Julie Delpy: Why are you talking to him? I wrote it!

I know you wrote it, but he’s in the scene. I was talking to both of you.

Chris Rock: Geez, Julie. You’re so defensive!

J.D.: It’s just that when you’re a woman filmmaker, people always think the guys have written their own dialogue.

C.R.: Right, and when it’s a comedy people always think the best stuff is ad-libbed. Always!

I think you’re right. But why do they think that?

C.R.: Probably because the best stuff in comedy always is ad-libbed. [Laughter.] I mean, the movie has to be written first. It has to have a structure.

So, Julie, why is Chris’ character named Mingus?

J.D.: Well, first of all it’s to honor Charles Mingus, obviously. But I thought it was a good character name.

C.R.: It’s a great character name.

J.D.: It tells you something about his parents: They were cool, New York people, they were into jazz. And then, of course, it rhymes with “cunnilingus.”

In both languages!

J.D.: In both languages. So it was perfect.

So how did you two get hooked up for this movie?

C.R.: We were sleeping together anyway.

J.D.: For a long time. And then I was like …

C.R.: Should we work together? We probably should, just to throw our significant others off the track: “You guys are sure having a lot of meetings!”

J.D.: How did it happen? [Reacting to a sudden sunbeam.] Oh, I hate the sun! Can you stand the sun? I like to be in the shade.

C.R.: I’ll sit in the sun. I need it. I’m a flower, I need sunlight and water. [They change places.]

J.D.: I hate it. I’m a radish, or maybe a mushroom. I like the basement. Basically, when I decided I wanted to write something continuing the character of Marion and her family, I thought I couldn’t do a sequel with the same guy. It would be too much like “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset.” And I thought that Marion was the kind of girl where it might not work out with Jack anyway, so I thought, oh, she has a new boyfriend. The first person that came to mind was Chris. I knew his work and I loved his work. I had met him briefly at an Oscar event when I was nominated for the “Before Sunset” screenplay. I loved his energy, and I thought, oh, that’d be an interesting couple, that sounds really cool and fun. So I called Chris’ agent, who told me: Write a good script! Don’t write a bad script!

Chris, you were saying earlier that you don’t get offered that many acting roles, except as, you know, being the cut-up.

C.R.: Yeah, I mean, people want me to perform, kind of. I don’t get a lot of things like this – this is like a well-rounded part, you know? I jump on any well-rounded part.

How different or similar is Mingus to you, do you think?

C.R.: I mean, I’m a father. I’m married, I have kids, I have in-laws, so I can relate to the whole thing.

J.D.: His in-laws are obviously not …

C.R.: Not French, right. My in-laws are from Oakland. You ever been to Oakland?

I have. I grew up in Oakland!

C.R.: Right, there you go. So you know, from Brooklyn that’s a whole different thing. But, you know, there’s a lot of levels on which I can relate to this guy.

How much of this story is autobiographical for you, Julie? With your real dad playing your dad in the film, there’s got to be something.

J.D.: Well, there’s the stress of having a family and being an artist without totally selling your soul – and Marion does sell her soul, literally. How do you keep on going as a mother, artist and writer? And then there’s the question of mortality. She loses her mother, and I lost my mother not long ago. I had to deal with that, I had to get it out somehow.

I’ve had a lot of uncomfortable moments in my life, a lot of moments where you’re with someone and then it suddenly falls out of place, like a Rubik’s Cube that gets turned one way and then it all goes wrong. At the moment it happens it’s very painful, but then when you look back it’s kind of funny, as long as no one dies in the mix. It’s happened to me a lot – I’m a panicky, neurotic person, so I get in crazy situations.

Awkwardness is one of the most basic elements of comedy, and you push that pretty hard in this film. Maybe never harder than the scene when Mingus and Marion’s father go to get a massage together. I mean you guys were stuck doing a scene, and you barely speak a word of each other’s language.

C.R.: It really was kind of awkward to shoot with a guy where we don’t speak the same language. I mean, not at all. There’s nothing. Nothing!

J.D.: The scene where my dad tickles him with a feather was mostly ad-libbed, and I could see in your eyes, “What the hell is going on? What’s going to happen?”

C.R.: Literally, you’re remembering improv class: OK, run with it! Don’t say no! Don’t panic! Someone comes up with a situation, you say, “Sure!” You gotta play along. Also, the guy I’m playing is, like, a combination of Nelson George and Elvis Mitchell. I’ve hung out with both of those guys. I met Nelson when he was working at the Village Voice, which is exactly where my character works. And they’re both very cool, they don’t overreact. So I had that to work with.

That’s funny. I thought your character reminded me of the novelist Colson Whitehead.

C.R.: I don’t really know Colson Whitehead, although I’ve read a couple of his books. It’s more Elvis Mitchell. Even the hair is, like, an homage to Elvis Mitchell.

Talk about the way Mingus talks to Barack Obama. That’s kind of a weird psychological touch.

J.D.: It was one of the first things I thought of when Chris said OK, that it would be funny to have someone who talks to a cardboard cutout of the president. Plus, it’s not about big political issues or whatever, he talks to him about his love life.

C.R.: We both love “The King of Comedy.” We’re big Rupert Pupkin fans.

J.D.: It’s my favorite film. So it was also a bit of an homage to that. You know, people say Chris is the straight man in the film, but it’s not really true. He does talk to the president. He has his own form of craziness.

That whole thing would be really, really different if Bush were still president.

C.R.: No, no. No way! Maybe Condoleezza Rice. Maybe.

It’s interesting that this movie isn’t really about the issue of interracial relationships at all. It’s just accepted, and hardly anyone talks about it.

C.R.: Because it isn’t really an issue. Show me one place where it’s still a taboo. I see it every day, and I see it more outside of New York and L.A. I see it more in the middle of the country than in the cities.

J.D.: You know, I think in film it’s still a taboo. I never thought about it when I was writing the screenplay, and I didn’t even want to bring it up in the film. It’s just old, like something from the ‘60s, or even the ‘50s.

C.R.: One of the movies I’m working on, I’m trying to get Melissa McCarthy to play my wife. I think we’d make the perfect Jerry Springer couple. But it’s kind of boring, to bring it up as an issue.

Chris, you talked earlier about going for more well-rounded dramatic parts. I could imagine a career arc like, say, Tom Hanks, where you start out in comedy and move toward more serious material.

C.R.: Well, I’ll say this: As you get older, you’re less believable in the silly stuff. You kind of have to start acting or die, more or less. Tom Hanks can’t be in “Bachelor Party” anymore, you know what I mean? You’re gonna have to have a wife, you’re gonna have to have some kids, you’re gonna have to be in relationships. You’re gonna have to be a real person to work. And I want to work. So bring on the real people!

Do you enjoy being a movie actor? It’s a pretty different job description from being a stand-up comedian.

C.R.: Oh, yeah. I like working; it’s fun! The acting thing is great, as long as the work is good. When you have to sell something bad, it’s awful. You know, would I rather be with my kids right now? Yes. But I’m sitting here with you, and it’s a good movie. It feels good to sell it! Do you know how horrible this would be right now if I didn’t like the movie? [Laughter.]