'Me and You' connects with its quirky optimism
In one of her early experimental monologues, the wispy-voiced performance artist Miranda July asked the audience, ''Do you love me? Even though I'm a little bit irritating?" On the evidence of ''Me and You and Everyone We Know," her first feature film, the answers are ''Yes" and ''I know what you mean."
Acclaimed at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where it won a prize for ''originality of vision," this highly entertaining art-house curio goes so heavy on the quirk and faux naivete that you may be tempted to resist -- that is, if you're not offended by July's childlike approach to underage sexuality, among other extremely loaded matters. Yet the filmmaker's gentle, surreal optimism takes the sting out of such issues (indeed, that's what bothers her critics) and fills ''Me and You" with the helium of human kindness. Set in a down-at-the-heels suburb that might be called Anywhere, America, the movie looks for connection in the oddest places, and, with an emotional impact out of all proportion to its gossamer touch, finds it.
The tone suggests an unthreatening Todd Solondz or ''Napoleon Dynamite" for grown-ups, and the plot, such as it is, revolves around two free ions careening around a brightly lit wasteland. Christine (July) is an artist specializing in oddball installations who runs an elder-care taxi service to pay the rent. Richard (John Hawkes) is a shopping-mall shoe salesman who has recently separated from his wife (JoNell Kennedy) and is running out of things to say to his sons, teenage Peter (Miles Thompson) and 6-year-old Robby (Brandon Ratcliff).
There's not so much a love story here as a run-up to a love story -- including one daft sequence in which the two compress a lifelong relationship into the space of three city blocks -- and, besides, July is more interested in the side streets. As the adults fumble toward intimacy, so too do the kids in their worldly, clueless fashion. Peter, watchful and un-macho, is drawn to the self-assured Sylvie (Carlie Westerman), who apparently has been preparing her hope chest (''That's 'trousseau' in French") since birth. At the same time, he's terrified of two 16-year-old girls (Natasha Slayton and Najarra Townsend) who are into hit-and-run flaunting.
These two also tease Richard's burly, shy co-worker (Brad Henke) into posting his prurient thoughts about them in Magic Marker memos taped to his window (they're appalled and tickled in equal measure). And in July's most taboo-busting development, little Robby falls into an instant-message romance with an unseen adult female. That this plays out in a manner both hilarious and resolutely faithful to the interests of your average 6-year-old is a testament to the director's inspired touch. At the very least, the movie coins a useful new Internet emoticon: ))<>((.
With all this, remarkably, ''Me and You" doesn't shock so much as soothe. July is fascinated both by the ways we keep each other at bay and the tactics we use to break through, and her insistent message is that ''life is happening, really happening, right now." Grabbing it is paramount, especially in a society that can sell picture frames that say ''I love you" to people who can't say it for themselves.
July has been creating performance pieces and installations for a decade or so -- her early work had a retrospective at M.I.T.'s Center for Advanced Visual Studies this past May -- and she moves into narrative feature films with a confidence that belies her dizzy on-screen persona. She looks like a pretty goose, and sounds like one, too, but there's an aesthetic toughness behind the fragile facade that provides her movie with a backbone.
Granted, a little of her patented whimsy goes a long way, and if the plot synopsis above doesn't put you off, the film's occasionally overbearing preciousness may set your teeth on edge. Yet this viewer was won over almost in spite of himself, and moved beyond words by the unexpected affirmation that ends the film. In ''Me and You and Everyone We Know," life is a closed loop of experience and emotion that goes back and forth, forever.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. 
