My first thought for a first sentence of this review was “I don’t get it.” But that was at about 1/4 of the way through this sparse (budget – $100,000) and ingenious film that unfolds at its own leisurely pace, with every scene building upon the last.

The story is simple. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara are a young couple on the verge of a move from their home when Affleck dies in a tragic traffic accident. Rather than ascend to the hereafter, his ghost returns to the home. And that is where we find him. For all ages. Mind you, he is not in a CGI, wispy and elegiac form. He is wearing a sheet with two holes cut out for eyes.  And his rambler (not a creepy Victorian) is the place he haunts, throughout eternity.

Wordlessly.

The film is at first uncomfortable.  It’s hard to adjust to the low-tech representation of ghostdom, and writer director David Lowery’s penchant for lassitude tests, but soon, through the patience of the director and the stoic and sad nature of Affleck’s choice, you invest totally in his journey.

This is an art film. As such, it takes chances other movies would not dream of. Not all of its choices hit the mark, but by the end, it proves to be thoughtful, accomplished, and really intriguing.

I am stil not sure that I get it. But have been thinking and talking about it ever since watching. That alone merits high marks.

The premise of this movie, and the ensuing byzantine plot, are so audacious that it almost makes up for being such a slick piece of crap.

Ben Affleck is an accountant. But not your everyday accountant. He is autistic, but has had the more extreme manifestations of that condition beaten out of him by his rigid, military father. Accordingly, he can function, and function he does, rather highly. He has millions of dollars. He owns a Jackson Pollock. He has gold bullion. He can shoot a watermelon from a mile away.

He works in a strip mall as an accountant, but when he is not doing the books for local farmers, he is doing them for large, dirty multinational corporations while ratting out their wrongdoing to the Department of the Treasury.

The only really good things I can say about this movie are that it is watchable in an aghast, mouth-open kind of way. Affleck, playing a character who is struggling to convey emotion, appears to be on the verge of laughing out loud every scene. As every scene gets progressively funnier and funnier, his reserve becomes more impressive.

It’s not good but marginally entertaining.

An affecting confluence of nostalgia and deep emotion born of human connectedness, this film presents as a standard coming of age tale, but it is a great deal more.  We find 15 year old Jamie (Lucas Jade Zuman) growing up in Santa Barbara in the late 70s with his idiosyncratic mother (Annette Bening, a mix of traditionalist and free thinker), who raises him in a home in which she rents out rooms to people who will eventually become instrumental in his upbringing.  Her cockeyed plan at the outset is to rely on one of her renters, a feminist photographer (Greta Gerwig), and an older neighbor teen (Elle Fanning) to teach her son how to be “a man.”

Bening beautifully renders a woman grappling with her own doubts, confusing times (she is referred to as a daughter of “the Depression” by her son as if she has an illness, and at one point she notes, “I think history has been tough on men.  I mean, they can’t be what they were, and they can’t figure out what’s next”), and the establishment of her own values (my favorite of her observations is “Wondering if you’re happy is a great shortcut to just being depressed”).

There are too many pitch-perfect, smart scenes to recount, but some merit mention, particularly the scene where the house handyman (Billy Crudup) who – having been deemed an insufficient role model because he and the boy do not connect – signs on as Bening’s guide to the culture, and in particular, punk rock. When Bening and Crudup, who is a bit of a hippie, attempt to dance,  first to Black Flag and later to Talking Heads, the result is a joyous rendering of representatives of two distinct tribes trying to understand the totems of a third.  The scene is almost as funny as when Gerwig insists that everybody at a house dinner party not only acknowledges her period, but says the word “menstruation” out loud.  And Fanning’s advice to the boy after he corrects a neighborhood kid boasting of his sexual prowess with a dissertation on the mechanics of the clitoris (for which he catches a beating) is both cruel and exceedingly wise.

In the wrong hands, this film would be a series of snappy vignettes, one more quirky than the next, and the result would likely have been cloying and unsatisfying.  But writer director Mike Mills never slums for your laughs or tears, and he stitches together the experiences of the characters seamlessly through the process of brief biographical snippets.  Better yet, he has a strong sense of what is authentic, and the film is loaded with grit and heart.

Some will accuse the picture of dragging, but I felt it simply took its time, allowing the feel to make the same deep impression as the dialogue, and nothing felt gratuitous.  One of the best from last year.