Beyond the Multiplex

"Hannah Takes the Stairs": Three boyfriends, one bathtub and the "1812 Overture" as a trumpet duet
"There's something that seems really wrong about handing somebody a script and saying, 'It's OK, I already wrote it. You just need to do this,'" said Joe Swanberg. He's a large, cheerful fellow who looks like the kind of faintly bohemian college football player who might have a copy of "On the Road" stuffed in his locker. We were sitting in a cluttered conference room at the South by Southwest Film Festival, last March in Austin, Texas. Under the programming guidance of Matt Dentler, SXSW has become the DIY filmmaking movement's mini-Mecca. "I'd much rather say, 'What do we like about each other?'" Swanberg continues. "'What do we want to learn about each other? And how do we turn that into a movie?'"

That manifesto summarizes both the potential and the difficulties of Swanberg's rigorously improvised approach to filmmaking, and more specifically of "Hannah Takes the Stairs," his densest and most accomplished work to date. (He has made two previous features, "LOL" and "Kissing on the Mouth," along with an ongoing Internet soap opera called "Young American Bodies.")

Swanberg half-intentionally parodies the title of a legendary indie film of an earlier generation, and indeed there's something oddly reminiscent of Woody Allen about his work -- if you can imagine Allen dead broke at age 25, making zero-budget movies starring his semislacker friends. Swanberg has the same obsession with failed male-female communication (in his case, uniquely crippled by the new technologies that supposedly enable it) and a similar set of neurotic, self-involved characters, bouncing through serial-monogamous couplings with no clear end in view.

While "LOL" focused on a posse of three fatally passive-aggressive guys too addicted to electronic modes of communication to pay attention to real-life women, "Hannah Takes the Stairs" reverses the sexual polarities. Its protagonist is a likable, perennially self-absorbed blond named Hannah (Greta Gerwig), who's half femme fatale and half Lucille Ball. Her story doesn't have much plot, but it has a nearly perfect symmetry: We witness the end of her relationship with a handsome deadbeat musician (Mark Duplass), the full arc of her next one, with a geeky, obsessive co-worker (Bujalski), and the beginning of a new one, with a sweet-tempered, slightly older guy (Kent Osborne).

Swanberg's improvisational technique, tightly focused camerawork and deliberately choppy editing forces our attention to individual scenes rather than overarching story, and many of those have sharply observed moments. When Duplass' and Bujalski's characters abruptly swerve away from Hannah, without the courage to break up with her, or when Hannah subtly sabotages the imminent romance between Osborne's character and her supposed best friend, it may bring back cringe-worthy memories of your own recent or not-so-recent romantic misdeeds. The film's intimacy never feels fake, it's sporadically and unpredictably funny (I didn't exactly enjoy the cacophonous trumpet duet of the "1812 Overture," but I won't soon forget it), and the nonprofessional cast is surprisingly good.

Still, it's those same qualities -- the choppiness, the unrelenting self-examination, the almost painful sincerity, the low production values, the absence of conventional plotting -- that will make at least some viewers bored and dissatisfied with "Hannah Takes the Stairs." At the film's SXSW premiere, a whole row of women in front of me, who had settled in with popcorn, Cokes and evident enthusiasm, got up and left after half an hour. Clearly, they didn't find this entertaining.

Swanberg comes off in person as modest and humble, even eager to accept criticism. But he makes it clear that his aesthetic principles come ahead of pleasing a larger audience. It's frustrating to see viewers driven away, Swanberg says, "but when you weigh that frustration against having to make other kinds of movies, making the kinds of movies you want to wins out in the end. It's always hard to put so much love and energy and work into a film and then say, 'Oh, but only 1/100 of the people are going to see it.' But I'm stubborn, and I'd rather have the audience change to like my films than to change my films so the audience likes them.

"There's nothing about 'Hannah Takes the Stairs' that couldn't be reproduced with movie stars as a cutesy romantic comedy," he goes on. "It's totally doable. But by doing that, you would take all the things that make 'Hannah' special and strip them away. I'm totally uninterested in going that route." He is more likely to make a zombie or a superhero movie, he says, than to make his old movies over again with mainstream resources. "I think going to the place that's going to scare you and challenge you is the right path, versus saying, 'Oh, I already did this and it works, so now I can redo it for more money.'"

If my endorsement of "Hannah Takes the Stairs" sounds lukewarm, maybe it is. I admired its patchy, uneven bittersweetness and its undeniable integrity, without ever loving it or feeling swept up in it. But, for Christ's sake, let's give the guy a break. Swanberg has been out of college for four years and all he's managed to do is make three feature films (with another in the can), several shorts and an Internet video serial. At this point, his genius is more about his generosity and entrepreneurship, his daring and ambition, his vision of what is possible and what may become possible, than it is about the movies he has made. "Hannah Takes the Stairs" cost $40,000, which is by far the most money he has ever worked with.

Working cheaply, with off-the-shelf video cameras and a nonprofessional crew, Swanberg says, is the price of artistic freedom. "It takes tremendous weight off your shoulders in terms of what you're going to tackle. If I'd had to do 'Kissing on the Mouth' on a cheap film budget of, like, $50,000, I don't think I would have even set out to make the film, because it would be so unrealistic to think that it would make that money back. But knowing that it was only going to cost a few thousand dollars, and knowing that it was my few thousand dollars, allowed me to say, 'Cool, this is the movie I want to make. So I'll make it.'"

"Hannah Takes the Stairs" is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, as part of "The New Talkies: Generation DIY." It opens Sept. 7 in Boston, Sept. 21 in Los Angeles and Sept. 28 in Seattle, with more cities to follow.

Next page: The seductive, treacherous world of Michael Haneke