He’s flippin’ crazy, that irascible Vincent Gallo (sample rant from his eponymous web site: “The only impact Harmony Korine will have will be on the lives of the girls he slipped drugs to, got stoned and raped while they were passed out — an autobiographical scenario he chose to include in his average screenplay Kids…”), but one thing’s for certain: he’s committed to following his own myriad artistic instincts, down whatever rabbit holes they may lead him. I was thinking about this again when I was talking with a friend about Gallo’s uncommonly tender The Brown Bunny, so I thought I’d re-post elements of my original theatrical review.

The film is a rarity in modern American cinema — a movie about masculine neediness. This isn’t to say that the movie is an easy, pleasurable watch. Far from it, in fact. The Brown Bunny‘s pace is punishingly, defiantly slow, and it’s still generally the kind of thing that you admire more than actively enjoy, so modest are its at-arm’s-length rewards. The film stars producer-editor-director-cinematographer Gallo (who else?) as Bud Clay, a haunted shell of a man who, after a motocross race, winds his way slowly west toward Los Angeles and a damaged relationship with his waiting girlfriend, Daisy (Chloë Sevigny). Along the way he grapples, in often abstract ways, with both fidelity and loneliness.

Caring as little as Gallo does for conventional structure and pacing, The Brown Bunny is designed as much to elicit mood as anything else; de facto mini-musical videos of open road (Gordon Lightfoot, Jackson Frank) alternate and share the screen with a few loose story strands that find Bud awkwardly, casually and/or silently picking up a trio of women (Anna Vareschi, Cheryl Tiegs and Elizabeth Blake), all named for flowers, only to then just as quickly abandon them.

Much of the movie’s notoriety stems from its sexually explicit ending, and for the life of me I can’t decide whether this is bold, envelope-pushing, exhibitionistic folly or Gallo’s radical, deadpan, completely unspoken attempt to give The Brown Bunny — inarguably one of the most baldly uncommercial American movies of the past five years — an overtly sensational “hook” or selling point. The scene in question is shocking, yes, and even titillating, but also wholly inessential to the movie’s basic twist and, more importantly, emotional validation. As such it comes off as tangential sensationalism at a point when the characters’ raw emotionalism (“I wish you liked me again, like before… when you liked me the most,” says one, heartrendingly) should be ripping you in half.

Gallo, who previously directed Buffalo ’66, places a fetishistic premium on setting and place that touches rewarding and then frequently sprints right past it into tedium’s waiting bosom. With long, loooooong establishing shots and a good many passages that lack disciplined pruning, the look of the movie summons comparisons of an even fuzzier, further off-center Miller High Life commercial. Taken in sum, the preceding are evidence of Gallo’s brutal — and, in some respects, dazzlingly audacious — disregard for audience sympathy or even reaction. I’d be intrigued to see this material paired with a like-minded yet stronger directorial hand; as is, The Brown Bunny too frequently comes across as a series of accumulated mundanities rather than the racked-focus character portrait it should be. And yet there’s still a quiet, unassuming integrity and untainted throughline to the picture. The Brown Bunny certainly isn’t for the casual moviegoer, and maybe not even for most devoted film fans. Its sad, lonely portrayal of romantic resignation and arrested development, though — most hauntingly captured in Bud’s keening, high-pitched mutterings at film’s end — is something that clings to your memory like a form-fitting psychological trauma. (Wellspring, unrated, 93 minutes)