Home movie

MEET THE PARENTS Mikey (Matt Boren, left) gets cozy with real-life couple Flo and Ken Jacobs.

Homecomings can be dangerous. The free laundry service, the perpetually stocked refrigerator: Creature comforts for the stomach and the soul are in unending supply. It’s a mighty temptation, as filmmaker Azazel Jacobs discovered during a visit with his folks. “One morning I found food and coffee waiting for me. And I thought, Hey, why did I leave this? I thought it was funny, and I started toying around with that idea.”

That moment grew into Momma’s Man, a surprisingly moving portrait of a Californian named Mikey (Matt Boren) who puts his uninspiring job—and his wife and baby—on hold so he can live with the New Yorker parents whose eccentricities used to embarrass him. “The more I was writing, the more I made it a person who originally rejected what they were about, and the more heavy and compelling it became,” says Jacobs on the phone from his home in L.A.

Because the film is set almost entirely within the Chambers Street loft in which Jacobs grew up—and stars his real-life parents, Ken and Flo—it transcends its dramatic function to become a poignant home movie all its own. “The older I get, the older my folks get,” says Jacobs. “It’s painful for me to think about being without them. And this is a way to confront that and hold on. I just can’t wait to have kids and show this to them.”

The rest of us can see it this weekend at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “New Directors/New Films” festival, before its theatrical release later this year. Hard-core cinéastes already know Ken Jacobs as one of the leading figures of experimental cinema, whose 1969 work, Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son, was deemed one of the most important films of the 20th century by the Library of Congress. But the other major downtown celebrity in Momma’s Man is the Jacobses’ rent-controlled pad, a ramshackle 1,625-square-foot time capsule of bohemian Tribeca where Ken and Flo have lived since 1965.

It was in that loft that Azazel and his older sister, Nisi, learned to value education, art and politics over money, and where the Jacobses’ friends and associates—among them such acclaimed figures as Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, George and Mike Kuchar, and Art Spiegelman—would turn any casual visit into an instant salon. “It must have seemed batty sometimes,” Ken Jacobs says on the phone from his home. He points out that the kids were free to think and say what they wanted, but they had to be part of the conversation. “We sat at the table and ate and spoke together almost all the time. What could they do? They were sort of pulled into a lot of our concerns.”

His son remembers being alternately baffled and transfixed. “We’d go to Jonas’s and I would fall asleep to them arguing and fighting and storming out and coming back in,” says Azazel. “This work was so important to them, and in some ways it was so completely ignored by most of the world.”

One of the more affecting aspects of Momma’s Man is the extent to which the art of Jacobs père is spotlighted. Three different works, including a videotaped excerpt from the live performance piece Chronometer and the short film “Spaghetti Aza” (itself recycled for Ken Jacobs’s magnum opus, Star Spangled to Death), are featured prominently. The son clearly admires the father. “He’s lived a life of no compromises,” says Azazel. “I can’t compete with that. I’ve already worked on other people’s stuff that I didn’t believe in. I’m already corrupted.”

Still, his father is just as proud of his offspring. “What Aza said in his film is so clear and accurate,” Ken says. “And his mother and I feel a deep acceptance and approval from him. To have your kid really respectfully appreciate what you do? That’s very valuable.”

Momma’s Man plays Fri 28 and Sat 29 at the “New Directors/New Films” festival at Lincoln Center.