American Movie

(Columbia TriStar)

Chris Smith's mordantly hilarious and strangely uplifting documentary follows the career of Mark Borchardt, a 30-year-old high-school dropout and part-time newspaper deliverer and cemetery groundskeeper who wants to be a filmmaker. Mark expounds on his grandiose vision for his six-years-in-development autobiographical first feature, Northwestern, to a "production meeting" attended by bewildered-looking misfits, but as it becomes clear that there's no script, no money, no cast, and no backers, he resorts to a fallback plan: a half-hour short about a recovery group with Satanic ambitions that he can market directly to video and raise enough money to resume his epic. The shots from the finished "Coven" that follow show that, in fact, Borchardt does have an eye. Whether Northwestern will ever see the screen or be worth the wait is problematic, but the ordeal and the vision behind it, as recorded in Smith's movie, remain a rueful, uproarious version of the American Dream.