by SARAH ROWLAND

Made for an unbelievable $218 (U.S.), Jonathan Caouette’s phenomenal debut documentary, Tarnation, is a highly stylistic collage of phone messages, photos and home movies he accumulated over the years, plus a few Super-8 reenactments thrown in for good measure.

The filmmaker’s mixed media love letter to his mom starts off with 30-year-old Caouette getting a call, informing him that she has just OD’d on lithium. From there, he brings us up to speed on her tragic life, through a series of stills and captions, underscored by a wicked indie soundtrack.

After several misdiagnoses and subsequent electroshock therapy treatments courtesy of the Texas mental health system, it’s pretty clear that her chances of happiness are next to nil. And things only seem to get worse for the Texan single mother. When she was deemed an unfit parent, Caouette was ripped away from her and forced to live with abusive foster parents before his grandparents took him.

He fast-forwards through his first 10 years on the planet, but slows things down by cutting in the footage he shot at age 11—when his mother’s mental demise was clearly taking its toll on the gay punk rocker.

Throughout this non-fictional piece of queer teen Americana, Caouette never turns the camera off, not even when his decrepit grandmother is recovering from a stroke. He keeps filming the milky-eyed and toothless bluehair as she bobs her head around, struggling to focus on who she’s talking to. Yet the movie never feels exploitative because the award-winning director’s love and total acceptance of his family never wavers—especially his undying devotion for his mother, whose brain was permanently fried from the medication overdose.

More often than not, the surreal snippets of Caouette’s life feel like they could be a hallucination sequence in My Own Private Idaho—which could explain why Gus Van Sant was so impressed with the film that he signed on as executive producer. And the secondary characters, made up of his homophobic deadbeat father and inbred yet loving grandparents seem like they could have been cast in Harmony Korine’s Gummo.

In fact, it’s easy to forget that you’re not watching fiction, but a riveting and heartfelt doc, made for under $300.

Tarnation opens at Cinéma du Parc, Friday, Jan. 28

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