Septuagenarian Tobias Schneebaum doesn’t swim, doesn’t drive, and doesn’t ride a bicycle. The one-time Abstract Expressionist is soft-spoken and particular, and not especially adventurous or fast-moving. How, then, did he go from being Norman Mailer’s " house homosexual " to keeping company with cannibals in the Peruvian jungle? Keep the River on Your Right can’t answer this question. To its credit, it doesn’t try. Instead, documentarians David and Laurie Shapiro simply follow Schneebaum while he recounts his adventures, revisits the " primitives " he loved (perhaps to a fault), and tries to make sense of his life as he nears the end of it.

The structure is counter-intuitive. We begin with Schneebaum’s current life and circle back until both the memories and the man return to Peru. As much as he accepted his experiences among the Amarakaire at the time, he has trouble fashioning a coherent narrative for his life, finding both problems and peace in different aspects of the societies he has straddled. In its free-associative approach, Keep the River deftly reproduces Schneebaum’s unique perspective (an experience that alone is worth the admission price), so that everything we encounter — a grocery store, an Asmat circumcision ceremony, a Passover dinner — is at once strange, wondrous, and familiar. Like Schneebaum himself, the film chooses to " play with " rather than " study " its subject. By the end, that seems a compassionate, logical, and inherently superior choice.