Sara Diaz in "The GoodTimesKid," Crooked Teeth Productions, 2005

More indie yet, Azazel Jacobs’ "The GoodTimesKid" (2005) reveals the dippy cinema world that Jacobs, son of alt-film grand poobah Ken Jacobs, built for himself before breaking out, more or less, with “Momma’s Man” (2008), and it’s a mopey, stone-faced, lackadaisical hoot, though it is rarely outright funny, and hardly ever tries to be.

Jacobs himself plays one Rodolfo Cano, a wild-haired LA demi-punk fed up with his life and his cluttered cottage and his record collection and his spider-limbed, raven-haired girlfriend (real-life squeeze Sara Diaz). He’s signed up for Army service, but when the letter comes (on his birthday, and the fate of the birthday cake his girlfriend baked is one of the film’s funny/maybe-not-funny moments), another wild-haired Rodolfo Cano (Mexican filmmaker Gerardo Naranjo), a lonely nowhere man living on a docked boat, gets the same letter. Non-antics ensue.

The comparisons made by partisans to Tati are, I think, a little grandiose, but you can see a kind of fading Gen-X American Kaurismäki forming in the film’s in-between spaces -- Jacobs’ reticent sense of humor is one you have to rise to, but it doesn’t feel like any other. Forced by poverty to do everything himself with his co-stars (Jacobs and Naranjo co-wrote, and also rolled the camera whenever they weren’t in the shot), Jacobs makes the most of his friends: Naranjo is the spitting-image of a late ‘60s Alan Arkin (complete with a faux-debonair mustache), and his passive watchfulness is both entrancing and, in the end, narratively purposeful. But Diaz is a camera lens’ sweetheart: a laconic fusion of Audrey Hepburn and a young Conrad Veidt, she trumps Shelley Duvall’s Olive Oyl, and is also hypnotically watchful -- except when she dozes, in the film’s stirring, one-shot penultimate set-up. "Acting" per se isn’t any more of a question here than "character"; the dramatic scheme is akin to suggesting various kinds of second shoes will drop but never do. The film leaves so much hanging, you begin to love the emptiness.

“London to Brighton” (Koch Vision) and “The GoodTimesKid” (Benten Films) are now available on DVD.

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