Night one of a two evening film and live presentation event with that seriously eccentric actor, filmmaker and writer Crispin Glover started off with a 45 minute or so slide show of images from eight of his books, with the energized Glover (at least for this part of the evening — the Q&A after the film, while starting out interesting, started to lag a bit over it’s 90 minutes or so) reading aloud from the absurd tales. The imagery and the concepts (including some of the books taking other source texts and artistically scribbling out and over them to create different narrative variations) were definitely conceptually intriguing but — I’m not sure if it was just me — I couldn’t for the life of me follow any of the stories themselves. Thankfully, they each were relatively short so they would end before wearing out their welcome — and I did enjoy the all-German one in which Glover shouted the foreign words with great Germanic zeal (speaking of that, not sure what the swastikas are all about that show up here and there throughout both his book and film work though).

Also not sure why Glover played this second entry, It is fine! Everything is fine, of his unfinished ‘It’ trilogy, on night one — and the first film What is it? on night two — other than perhaps because he recognizes this as the better, more narratively driven of the two films (now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean — by any stretch — it’s an audience friendly film; it most deliberately and charmingly isn’t!). Written by and starring the now deceased Steven Stewart, who struggled with severe cerebral palsy all his life (and eventually succumbed to complications from it), it seems clear director Glover saw it as an opportunity to unabashedly let Stewart play out a lifetime’s worth of repressed fantasy and resentment — told with a very amusing — and at times outright hilarious — tone of irreverence.

Now the fact that this (as Glover described it in the Q&A afterwards, ‘anti-corporate’) film grants the very debilitated Stewart the surprising position of main character (I was happy to realize afterwards that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t understand a damn word he said) would have been cool enough — but oh, no, Glover blows admirably way past that — by not only having the Stewart character NOT be the object of sympathy we would suspect (and that well mannered society expects), but instead be an entirely unapologetic sex addict — managing to score with one hot willing young woman after another — as well as a serial killer (!) who ends most of his intimate encounters by strangling the woman to death in a (fairly unconvincing) headlock. And then there’s the astonishingly explicit hardcore pornography in a number of the aforementioned sex scenes.

It is Fine!‘s determined and deeply admirable goal of destroying every mainstream-constructed conception of consumerable and status quo-beholden cinema may not always be brilliantly executed (though the wall-to-wall imaginative sets are pretty consistently fantastic), it is certainly startling, often hilarious and joyously subversive (even if ‘subversive’ is a word Glover claimed to not understand in the Q&A). And more? It’s ultimately affirming towards the physically handicapped, barely acknowledged as they are by the mainstream gaze as anything other than exploitable objects of pity.

Buck A Review