POSTHOC RATING: ****

American Movie, aloving, harrowing, funny, sad and sometimes inspiring documentary, is about the dream shared by many of our generation, a dream lived out by people ranging up the ladder of talent from Ed Wood, Jr. to John Cassavetes.  The dream of putting a personal vision on the screen, our way, with out any interference from Hollywood, “the Suits” or anyone in authority.  It’s the story of one man’s reach for a strange kind of purity.

We’re a nation of dreamers and we’re lucky to live in a time and space that allows so many of us the chance to make those dreams come true.  Previous generations may have dreamed of writing the Great American Novel or something homey like inventing a better mousetrap.  But in our time, it’s the dream of being a moviemaker that holds so many enthralled. (Either that or starting an IPO).

In American Movie, the dreamer is Mark Borchardt, a thirty-something resident of Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, a community northwest of Milwaukee.  Since he was thirteen Mark has been possessed by the idea of being a filmmaker and doing it his way.  He spent the early part of the 90s working on a film called Northwestern an apparently serious look at growing up in his hometown, ala Mean Streets.  But unable to get financing, he turns, in frustration, to an unfinished Grade C- horror movie called Coven and it’s the story of the completion of this ultra-cheap exploitation flick, that takes up the bulk of this film, right up past the premiere at a dilapidated theater in hometown.

American Movie gives us a close-up coarse-grained firsthand look at the trials and tribulations Borchardt went through to get this little movie done.  It’s a warts and all portrait. We meet him, his three daughters, his girlfriend (who’s 15 years his senior) his acid casualty buddy Mike  (who, despite his burned out visage, actually provides a fairly good score for the film), his supportive Swedish mother, his two skeptical brothers and his even more skeptical and distant father.  And finally, irascible, near-senile Uncle Bill whom Mark massages, cajoles, manipulates and, sometimes it must be said, bullies, into putting up the $3,000 Mark needs to finish Coven in exchange for a credit as executive producer.

Mark Borchardt is something of a holy fool, an innocent on the rampage with a movie camera. That his talent level might be closer to Ed Wood’s than Cassavetes’ never occurs to him.  The dream has taken over his consciousness like an invading army and there’s no driving it out.  He has the focus of a poorly aimed laser beam. We see him in his exhilarating highs and his stupefying lows, usually with a six-pack handy.  We glimpse the ruins of his previous marriage and the estrangement between him and his family. We see just how ingenious he has to be to get the simplest of camera set-ups done.  He even gets his mother to operate the camera in one hilarious sequence. The entire blue-collar texture of their lives feels true right down to the last frame. You also get a strong sense of Borchardt using his films to lash out at his bleak environment and to shout, “I’m here!” to a deaf world.

The film is sometimes discomfiting but never cruel. But it is sometimes deeply sad.  The saddest moment comes when we see Mark and his family watching the Green Bay Packers at the Super Bowl on TV (if you know anything about Wisconsin, you know the Packers are everything).  The sequence gives a sense of just how alone Mark is with his dream; how little of what he’s doing matters to the rest of the world around him.  The juxtaposition between the successful high-powered football team and the Grungy Skinny Filmmaker That Could gives a surprisingly poignant jolt. 

Producer-directors Chris Smith and Sarah Price were allowed into Mark’s life during the two years that it took him to finish Coven.  They’ve come up with a winner, that must, in some sense, be somewhat painful to Mark Borchardt, if only because they’re the better filmmakers. American Movie is beautifully shot and crisply edited with only a hint of raggedness. The screen breathes with these people.  You can almost reach out and touch them and smell the stale beer and moldy stuffed furniture. 

Mark Borchardt’s films look bad from what little we see of them (though a couple of his location shots capture that eerie bleak gloom common to the Upper Midwest in winter), but in the end that probably isn’t what matters.  That he’s been able to get as far as he did with so little money and so much gumption is what this wonderful film is really all about. He may turn out to be no more talented than Ed Wood and a million others, but thanks to Chris Smith and Sarah Price, he is by far the luckier man.