I go to Sundance looking for good films. What I'm really out to discover, though, isn't just a film but a voice — the sound of a filmmaker speaking to me, and doing it in a way I've never heard before. I'm looking for a vision.

I found it this year when I saw Momma's Man, a beautiful, wise, shaggy, poker-faced comedy of discombobulation that does nothing less than re-invent — and purify — that Sundance staple, the quirky, angst-ridden family drama. The writer-director, Azazel Jacobs, is the son of the venerable avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, and what Jacobs (the younger) has done is to merge his own life into fiction by casting his parents as the parents in the movie — and, just as vital, by shooting nearly all of it in their ancient Manhattan loft apartment, a supersize hole-in-the-wall that turns out to be one of the most spectacularly vivid and eccentric natural-born movie sets I've ever seen. Divvied into nooks and crannies and aisles and cubicles, and jammed from floor to ceiling with books, records, toys, recording equipment, and God knows what other multitudes of bric-a-brac, it's a pack-rate maze that's practically a city unto itself, and it becomes the landscape for a stirring tale of regeneration.

Mike (Matt Boren), the schlump of a protagonist, is quietly freaking out about the fact that he's a husband and a new daddy (he lives in Los Angeles). During a business trip to New York, he stops off to visit his parents — and refuses to leave. He regresses, sorting through his childhood memorabilia, calling up an old girlfriend, generally behaving like a depressed high-school sophomore. It's a scenario that sounds cute as hell, and might have been if it weren't for the fact that Jacobs works in a style that recalls early Jim Jarmusch, only more so. Ken and Flo Jacobs, as the parents, are a found-object comedy team: the Nichols and May of wacked, monosyllabic New York bohemia. They are also authentically dear. Ken is like Harpo Marx aged into a gray-haired Marxist intellectual, and Flo, smothering her Mikey with love (hence the title), is like a Modigliani come to life. The comedy emerges from their pricelessly awkward silences. This is an urban-ethnic household in which the stereotypical ''shouting'' is replaced by a kind of benign puttering, yet every glance, every gesture, every comment speaks a thousand loaded words. Mikey eventually does wander outside the loft, looking up his old buddy, a freaked-out war vet with a scary grin. When this dude stands up and sings, with utter passion, along to the Indigo Girls' ''Closer to Fine,'' it's a gorgeously ironic pop epiphany, as the song's prescription for how to live gets turned, on its head, into a warning to Mikey to start living beyond prescriptions. Momma's Man is a movie that forces you to slow your rhythms, but it's a work of true spirit, a voice in the din.

NEXT PAGE: Owen Gleiberman's thoughts on Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, and Patti Smith: Dream of Life

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