The first twenty minutes of Tarnation climaxes with one of the most astonishing performances I've ever seen: a lengthy monologue delivered by a housewife battered to the point of madness who is actually the films' writer/director Jonathan Caouette, age 11, dressed up and performing for his video camera. His acting at that age is strong enough to wring some tears, but its context in which he does it is what will make your heart truly ache. It reminded me slightly, off-handedly, in terms of content, of Charlize Theron's performance in Monster; except that this is better.

It is just one of the many videotapes and home movies unearthed and mashed together into this hallucinatory stream of someone else's consciousness, which technically is a documentary but actually is a love letter from a son to his mother. I mention the first twenty minutes specifically because they are like a synopsis for the rest of the film; they are a distillation of memories, poured into color and form, guided by a sincere, childlike narrative that is literally written across the screen like pages from a storybook. The rest of the movie delves into the same story in more detail. It is about Renee, a beautiful girl who jumped from a roof, and Jonathan, her son, who stands by her side even when both their lives fall to pieces.

Those memories are culled from hundreds of photos, super8 movies, home videos and audio recordings that Caouette somehow managed to hang onto over the course of his lifetime (he's now in his early thirties). The story goes that he was archiving these materials on his computer and started editing them together using Apple's iMovie software. He had enough material to reach all the way back to Renee's childhood and through his own upbringing, and he found bookends to the film when Renee overdosed on lithium in 2003 and subsequently came to live with him in New York. After tinkering for a while, he finished the entire movie in three weeks; and indeed, it has the feeling of something pent up for decades and poured out in one fluid burst.

It is not a documentary in the traditional sense of the word. The movie is based purely in fact, but these are not hard facts; everything seems ephemeral, like it's slipping through your fingers while you watch it, leaving you with notions and sensory perceptions rather than concrete truths. It's not something you can simply watch, with a subject matter you can form an opinion on; it's an experience, and one that plunges you almost immediately into a subjective state. Images flash across the screen, freeze, multiply, divide on themselves; music and voices layer on top of each other; the effect ranges from soothing to exhilarating to terrifying. These are effects you've seen before in music videos and perhaps in your own home movies (if you have an Apple computer, you have the ability to to make everything you see in this film), but Caouette has an artist's eye -- or perhaps this is just how he really sees things. He tells in the film about the time he smoked two joints that, unbeknownst to him, were laced with PCP and soaked with formaldehyde. Those chemicals wreaked havoc on his young brain, and as a result, he suffers from depersonalization disorder, the symptoms of which include a constant sense of disconnection and unreality. The film's style is tantamount to looking at things through his eyes, or remembering things from within his brain. I was reminded of Wim Wenders' Until The End Of The World, in which Max Von Sydow creates a machine that can record people's dreams. Tarnation feels like it was transcribed to film straight from Caouette's head.

Many of these memories are good ones: his embracing of gay club culture as a teenager, his first boyfriend, his short films, his impressive production of 'Blue Velvet: The Musical' at his high school. Then there are the many bad ones, like his multiple suicide attempts, or abuse at the hands of foster parents, or seeing his mother raped when he was a toddler. Although this is largely Jonathan's story, one gets the sense that his world revolves around his mother's. We learn that Renee was a beautiful flower child who, after being injured in a fall, was subjected (at the approval of her own parents) to more than 200 sessions of electro-shock therapy that left her in a precarious mental state. Her contact with Jonathan in his formative years is on and off; we see her now, after her lithium overdose has left her with permanent brain damage; she seems sometimes like a woman who would be hard to love, but Jonathan does, unconditionally. She is his mother, after all.

One of the producers of Tarnation is John Cameron Mitchell, the creator of Hedwig And The Angry Inch; he saw early pieces of the film and urged Caouette to see it through. The appeal is clear; like Hedwig, this is the story of deeply damaged people struggling with the pieces of who they are and where they came from, and ultimately, triumphantly, emerging complete. Except that this story is true, and so that triumph is especially sweet. By the end of those first twenty minutes, it's obvious that Caoutte is an immensely talented and heartfelt person. By the end of the film, the fact that his circumstances didn't keep him down and that his heart didn't harden is...well, it's nothing short of a testament to the essential strength and goodness of humanity, and in that aspect it goes far past being simply the story of a boy and his mother.