Screen Picks

Daddy Cool (Sun., April 17, 7 p.m., Bryn Mawr Theater; Mon., April 18, 7 p.m., County Theater; Tue., April 19, 7 p.m., Ambler Theater) Describe Pittsburgh's Brady Lewis as a cross between Todd Haynes and Craig Baldwin (Spectres of the Spectrum), or better yet, don't describe him at all — you'll inevitably come up with something less complicated, less wondrously strange, than his debut feature Daddy Cool, which does the Bryn Mawr-County-Ambler circuit this week. Even plot summary will get you into trouble: See, there's this girl, Roxanne (Streeter Nelson), who used to be a boy, whose twin sister's severed head lives in a jar in their televangelist father's basement, and she — the woman/ex-man, not the head — is seeking treatment with a psychiatrist (Larry John Myers) who has just the slightest touch of lycanthropy … Well, you get the picture. Or you probably don't, which is kind of the point.

This is a movie where reality interferes with dreams, not the other way around, and visions of the future manifest as sputtering TV transmissions. As evidenced by Alter, the surname Roxanne shares with her bodiless twin and ex-doctor father, Daddy Cool is best, maybe only, understood as a riff on transmogrification, which might explain why the film sometimes spasms like a moth fighting its way out of a cocoon. Lewis' homemade sci-fi has an obvious kinship to his fellow Pittsburgh filmmaker George Romero (Martin's John Amplas plays the elder Alter), savoring the nuance in affectless performances, although Lewis' landscape is more internal than cultural. Even if you wouldn't want to live there, it's a hell of a place to visit. Lewis will introduce all three screenings.

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