By Johnny Ray Huston

SEVEN SUMMERS AGO , I wrote a profile story about Miranda July for this paper. At the time I was living in July's hometown of Portland, Ore., and in the wake of the article, we sometimes rode bikes to each other's apartments on the southeast side. (Upon arriving from SF, I'd almost moved in next door.) I remember lending July a copy of Agnès Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7 and how much she loved the film – with an intensity matched only by her wonder at discovering we shared the same birthday. That moment was an odd one, the kind that leaves you feeling naked at discovering an unexpected connection. I liked July a lot, but I was going through a rough depression at the time, and her single-minded artistic focus – which generated an electric force field of sorts – wasn't relaxing to be around. "[Tapping into contemporary anxiety] is a dangerous skill," I'd written, "one July has honed through years of keeping a diary for herself and everyone she knows."

I'm not prone to tell-all confessionals, especially in movie reviews, but this week, as July's debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, hits theaters, I can't help but think back to the summer of '98, partly because July's character in the movie is a bit like she was at that time – tightly strung but hopeful, a developing artist fighting to get into museum contexts. Numerous grants, a few Whitney Biennials, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, and one Cannes Film Festival Camera D'Or prize later, July might just be the crossover figure of the moment, and I can't say I'm surprised. What is surprising is how much of her "crazy, fantastic" (to quote from her short video The Amateurist) worldview she's managed to maintain in a more mainstream context, successfully juggling crowd-pleasing vignettes with nervier ones to create a winning film.

To be sure, the thudding weight of Sundance groupthink sometimes drags at the edges of Me and You and Everyone We Know, threatening to turn the movie's oddballs into a sub-Solondz peanut gallery, when in fact July has been exploring hidden fantasies and the awkward power dynamics between children and adults since long before Happiness sent spooge flying off a balcony. But her levity prevails, even if at times other people in the movie seem to be echoing the amazement philosophies of July's character, Christine Jesperson. The rare exception – at least for a while – is a bloodless curator who gives Christine the cold shoulder, encouraging her to send a submission through the mail to the address where they're standing, instead of simply taking a videotape out of her hands. July places this meet-awkward situation between two elevator rides in which steel-walled reflections emphasize the difference between power-suited female haves and ill-dressed female have-not.

An Elder Cab driver, Christine falls for Richard (John Hawkes) one day on an errand visiting the shoe section of the department store where he works. Trouble is, Richard's still burned – quite literally, in fact – from a recent separation. As his sons, sleepy-eyed, older Peter (Miles Thompson) and tiny savant Robby (Brandon Ratcliff, beyond the valley of the ultra-adorables) can attest, he's hard to reach. But then, they're more concerned with using spaces and dashes to draw animals on a computer and – in the film's funniest thread – perpetrating some scatological chat room high jinks.

Richard's neighborhood is peopled with other misfits, including a 10-year-old budding perfect homemaker who is solemnly gathering her dowry in a hope chest, and two teenage girls eager to test out their oral skills, using Cody Chesnutt as a soundtrack and Chesnutt-type Peter as a guinea pig. In contrast, Christine and Richard's relationship is spontaneously volatile; shortly after meeting, they turn a two-block walk to their cars into a metaphor for the course of their lives. But when she dares to take a place in his passenger seat, his angry reaction could almost be a criticism of July's modus operandi as artist-director. "You're acting like I'm a man in a book that the woman in the book meets," he fumes, as Christine recoils from his sudden, near-violent shift in mood. Cinematically speaking, July's face – with blue eyes that look semi-shattered from past explosions – is perfect for this moment.

To twist a title from Varda's new wave contemporary Godard, this is a movie in which a woman is a woman written and performed by a woman – a sad rarity in US commercial film. What Richard lashes out at is Christine's tendency to embellish the details of everyday existence, a near-ritualistic practice that permeates the movie itself, a movie in which he is indeed a sort of fantasy soul mate. The pink stickers on Christine's steering wheel are little superstitious magic buttons for her to push, the mirror in her compact becomes a spotlight, and when she writes "FUCK" on her car's front window, she's driving forward into an imagined bad fortune. These details spill over into encounters that have nothing to with July's character, as when one person imagines a hard-on behind a crack in a wall, or – in the beautifully abstract finale – another uses a coin to tap out a signal against a metal signpost. On their own, July suggests, life's everyday signposts aren't enough; they need to be messed with, scrawled on, reimagined.

Of course, technology provides a playland for such impulses. Whereas Kiyoshi Kurosawa's brilliant Pulse views the Internet as a bottomless well of alienation, July sees it as a site for absurdist connectivity. (Unsurprisingly, in a film made by a white woman, it isn't race, class or age, but gender that provides the toughest lines to cross.) I'm not a critic who subscribes to the belief that a feature made with hundreds of people is inherently superior to a short made by one person, and for me, nothing here quite catches the bewildering potency of The Amateurist's 14 or so minutes, which convey the obsessive self-observation that's part of anyone's modern psyche. July's performance pieces, recordings, and short videos possess an inimitable, creepy quality, and I'd welcome a follow-up work that harnesses her power to disturb. Me and You and Everyone We Know trades in whimsy, a risky game plan that could have been cloying. Luckily, just when July seems in danger of creating a bunch of Redford-stamped American loveables, she throws a signature curveball that scores a strike. A Gallo-size backlash may await this writer-actor-director down the road, but for now, she's looking mighty fine.

'Me and You and Everyone We Know' opens Fri/1 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.