Mixing archival footage, animation and his own 21st-century photography, Heinzerling tells the story of the often painful and difficult 40-year relationship between Ushio and Noriko Shinohara, a pair of Japanese-born artists who live in New York. They aren’t famous or rich – at best, Ushio Shinohara is a minor name in the contemporary art world, best known for the improvisational “action paintings” he creates with a pair of paint-soaked boxing gloves. They have struggled, month after month and year after year, to make their work and make ends meet in a ruthless, trend-driven marketplace. Early in the film, 80-year-old Ushio hears from his wife, Noriko, that they’re critically short of money again – they’re late with the rent on their cluttered Brooklyn loft apartment, and need another $1,000 or so to keep the utilities turned on and put food in the fridge.

Furthermore, Heinzerling’s camera captures Ushio and Noriko as a long-submerged rift between them is opening up. Ushio is undeniably a forceful personality, and his big-canvas paintings are impressive, but he also comes off as a prideful, entitled jerk, insisting that “the average person should help the genius” and that his career should come first for obvious reasons: “Because I am the husband!” (Their not-so-friendly banter occurs in a fragmented mixture of English and Japanese; the subtitles are necessary for all possible viewers.) Noriko, who is more than 20 years younger than Ushio, set aside her own career for decades to raise their son Alex and serve as Ushio’s unpaid assistant, receptionist and chef, and she’s had quite enough of it. She’s begun to focus on her own work at last – and what a strange and powerful artistic rebellion that turns out to be.

Noriko, it turns out, has been drawing a comic-book-style narrative about an innocent, pigtailed girl named Cutie, who comes to New York and falls under the spell of a charismatic, drunken and constantly broke older artist named Bullie. I suppose you could say there are elements of R. Crumb-style comics or Japanese manga in the saga of Cutie, but visually Noriko’s idiosyncratic work is more like a combination of Renaissance art, children’s-book illustration and Picasso’s ink drawings. The therapeutic rage behind the Cutie cartoons is startlingly frank, and so is the clarity of the artistic vision. This is the document of a woman who has not given up, and never will. Cutie is seduced, impregnated and led far from her intended path, but her free and ferocious spirit is never diminished.