Movie Nation

“Tyrel” is “Get Out” without the vast White Wing Conspiracy.

Take away the implicit threat, the science fiction satire of importing while souls into African American bodies and you’ve got a modestly disturbing story of not fitting in, of a majority culture making a minority among its ranks uncomfortable, maybe imposed upon.

And it all happens while “they” aren’t even aware it’s happening.

Chilean-born writer-director Sebastián Silva (“Nasty Baby”) gives us an intimate mumblecore (lots and lots of talking) allegory about the struggle to maintain your identity when everything around you seems to subsume it.

Tyler, played by Jason Mitchell of “Straight Outta Compton,” needs to get out of the holidays drama going on with his girlfriend and her mother. So he joins friends John and Nico (Christopher Abbott, Nicolas Arze) for a party weekend in the snowy Catskill Mountains.

Nico is a house flipper, and he’s filling this big, older weekend home with friends to help Pete (Caleb Landry Jones of “American Made”) celebrate his birthday.

But the first sign of trouble comes when Tyler and John run out of gas. The very friendly neighbor (Ann Dowd of “The Handmaid’s Tale”) sees them pushing the car, and in the FRIENDLIEST and most helpful way — asks a LOT of questions. Especially of “Tyler.”

The guys meet up, arrive at their getaway, and there are more people here than Tyler counted on — five liberal white guys, ranging from the older, gayer Roddy (Roddy Bottum) to the loose cannon Pete are thrown together without enough beds, little privacy and a LOT of alcohol for a weekend bender.

“You get a toddy and YOU get a toddy and YOU get a toddy…I’m the Oprah of hot toddies!”

“If you’re feeling the cold, you’re not drunk enough.”

Let the games begin. Literally. These guys are all about parlor games — picking slips of paper out of the hat requiring each to do Buffalo Bob’s “puts on the lotion” speech from “Silence of the Lambs” in a different accent; as the Nordic singer Bjork, for instance. Roddy takes offense at his pick, pretty much on Tyler’s behalf.

“Black accent? What does that even mean?”

When Tyler — and admit it, you’re thinking “Tyrel” is a more “black” name — cannot manage much of a black accent himself, we kind of cringe for him, and for the drunks who don’t grasp what they just did.

As the all-night carousing goes on, complete with REM sing-alongs, much more booze and  pot and endless invasions of personal space and impositions of forced bonhomie — even jerky Pete treats Tyler as a close friend and takes liberties with that status — Tyler figures out pretty fast that this isn’t his scene, man.

And then the next day, MORE white guys show up. At least the gonzo cultural appropriator Allen (Michael Cera, a hoot) bonds with Tyler. He’s one of those 30ish dudes who has absorbed enough black culture to be the token black guy at even the whitest of gatherings. Of course Tyler feels a hint of kindred spirit in him. Allen insists on it, and in his mind, bringing a Donald Trump piñata seals the deal.

“NEVER trust the white man!”

Or maybe it’s the booze talking. “Truth serum” may not help when you trying to drunkenly correct somebody’s staggering Brazilian capoeira (martial arts) demonstration. It doesn’t help much at all as Tyler feels more isolated, threatened, in manhood and identity terms, as the weekend goes on.

Silva doesn’t deliver explosions, here. As in life, things turn cringe-worthy and a sharp edge or two is revealed and the “party” goes on too long for everybody, or anybody (especially the host) to have a good time.

But he finds a third act surprise or two, and Mitchell makes a compelling overmatched hero, a black man grasping for lifelines, somebody who might reflexively have his back — in terms of racial identity. And if he’s getting that from Michael Cera, you know he’s had too much to drink.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jason Mitchell, Christopher Abbott, Michael Cera, Caleb Landry Jones, Nicolas Arze , Reg. E Cathey, Ann Dowd

Credits: Written and directed by Sebastián Silva   A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:26

If you’ve heard of Nevada’s infamous “Area 51,” Ground Zero in the “Aliens Have Visited Us” conspiracy web, it’s because of Bob Lazar. He’s the man of science who popped up on TVs all over the world in 1989, saying he’d worked there, he’d been involved in “back engineering” flying saucer power systems and propulsion and that he’d seen little bitty green men.

Ok, maybe they weren’t green. And maybe he didn’t actually see them, their autopsies and what not. He’s kind of walked that back. A little.

But it’s been 30 years, and as much as Area 51 has entered the culture, the font of Big Government Secrets that drove “The X-Files” and movies from “Independence Day” to “Paul” to all sorts of cartoons, no further “proof” of his “We WANT to believe” claims has been verified. Nothing important, anyway.

So four-named documentarian Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell decided to revisit Lazar, who runs a scientific supply concern in Gallup, New Mexico, and see if he could get him to back down, walk back or explain why the proof hasn’t come out in the three decades after he dropped his bombshell.

In “Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers,” Corbell takes a shot at exploring what Lazar has convinced himself is true, how his “reality” might not be the same as ours. So he focuses almost entirely on Lazar, the polygraph tests and hypnosis he underwent over the years to “verify” his claims. Corbell interviews the Las Vegas TV reporter/personality and Lazar popularizer George Knapp (a producer on the film) about why he still believes Lazar.

And Corbell got Mickey Rourke to rumble a funny, dark and poetic narration in between the interviews, snippets of Bob interviewed “way back when,” animations and chunks of atomic bomb and space flight science films of the ’50s and ’60s.

“Memory is a mirage and mistress to desire.” “Beliefs are…stowaways in the imagination.”

Mickey should start his own church.

There are no real skeptics in “Area 51 & Flying Saucers,” just Corbell himself, who at times flirts with making this a personal essay about why he believes (or maybe has his doubts) about the claims of the two men, because at this point, Knapp is relying on the fact that “everybody in the world” carried this story to back up his own gullibility.

“The people who know him best believe him the most,” Knapp says (interviewed by phone), and Corbell confirms this one fact by talking to former neighbors and Lazar’s mother, who recalls her son’s teen years construction of a jet-engined powered bicycle (Lazar has a newer one he rides around in the movie). That proves…what exactly?

When the bookish, stereotypically nerdy Lazar is seen in 30 year old archival footage talking about seeing some guys in lab coats talking to little men, “gravity amplifiers, element 115” and “anti-matter reactors,” you wonder which comic books he’s closest to and how much “Star Trek” he has memorized.

Corbell all but crows in delight at showing Lazar a picture of U.S. government “bone scanning” ID technology that Lazar described, back in 1989, not the farthest fetched claim he made, but seemingly verified. But Corbell, a tattooed bearded hipster/believer who has named his filmmaking ventures “The World of Extraordinary Beliefs,” doesn’t show Lazar a fake mock up of the gadget first.

That would have been closer to a real “test,” see if Lazar falls for it — then show him the real deal. Corbell simply gives Lazar this one chance to say, “I told you so,” without actually testing him to verify that.

The film doesn’t need to see Corbell barking at his phone, “Call George Knapp,” but I guess if you can’t get the guy to sit down with you (Vanity? Embarrassment?), it’s a way of introducing Knapp and getting yourself on screen more as Corbell tries to “weaponize your curiosity.”

Lazar’s debunkers, “the people who despise him” is how Knapp portrays them, have punched holes in Lazar’s most easily verified claims — of an MIT/Cal Tech education. But when Los Alamos Labs said he never worked there, there are facility directories that list him.

Corbell asks the odd pointed question — “People say you saw an alien. Did you see an alien at S4 (one of the facilities at Groom Lake, Nevada, home of ‘Area 51’)?” But that’s only to allow Lazar to equivocate and take back at least one extraordinary claim, something he’s had thirty years to cook up an excuse for.

There are flying saucers there, he still insists. “Nine of them,” he says with Joseph McCarthy certitude, some of them “operational.”

“We have them. You don’t have to believe it, but we do.”

Lazar can get a little prickly about all the disbelief surrounding his claims that the government is still hiding what he says he worked on in an outrageous “suppression of science.” That explains Corbell’s kid-gloves approach, but doesn’t excuse it.

Lazar has been raided by the Feds and ridiculed by the scientific community, so a little paranoia and annoyance is understandable.

But in an era where wild conspiracies are a vital component of politics, when the future of the Republic and the Ecosystem is hanging on getting the gullible to let go of things that cannot be proven with facts, Corbell lets Lazar off the hook and seems to be building his own career out of “extraordinary beliefs” he can sell to the rubes.

Letting the guy say things he cannot prove — about “assassination attempts” and “nine flying saucers” and the like is one thing. Deciding that he really believes these things is another.

But not challenging his “reality,” while it may serve Corbell’s goals of becoming the Area 51 Filmmaker (if indeed that’s what he wants), is irresponsible and gutless.

Whatever he set out to do with “Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers,” the still questioning among us are left with “He seems like a high-functioning nut” if not a hoaxer. Still, tracking this modern myth back to its source is Corbell’s great public service.

All this hooey about alien autopsies, flying saucers and “the truth is out there” is based on the dubious testimony of one, lone conspiracy buff. THAT was the film Corbell could have made.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Bob Lazar, George Knapp, Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell, narrated by Mickey Rourke

Credits: Written and directed by Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:37

“Ralph Breaks the Internet” could conceivably hit $30 million its second week, another impressive take for Disney’s “Wreck it Ralph” sequel. Deadline.com is projecting $28 as of Sat. am, and their track record is to underestimate children’s fare when it comes to the sorts of Saturdays they have.

Which is why we have to keep an eye on the second place chase, as “The Grinch” is within the kiddie film margin for error of passing “Creed II” by the time everything’s counted Sunday at midnight. “Creed II” should clear $17, but will “Grinch” earn more than another $16 a month into its release?

“Bohemian Rhapsody” will manage another $9.5 to $10, still not closing the gap domestically against its musical competition, the Oscar-buzzed “A Star is Born.” “Rhapsody” will be over $165-166, “Star” will be close to $210 Sunday night.

“Fantastic Beasts” will add another $13, but will any of the awards contenders already out — “Green Book,” for instance, make any headway with audiences?

The Screen Gems horror outing “The Possession of Hannah Grace” wasn’t previewed for critics, was barely advertised and seems to have “escaped” rather than been released (weekend after Thanksgiving is a dumping ground for orphaned films). It might hit $6 million by midnight Sunday.

A former Fox News producer says they had a name for it; the network’s style, the “stories” favored there and the edict they were given from on high.

“We used to call it ‘Riling up the crazies,'” Joe Muto remembers in the documentary “Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes.”

And that’s what Roger Ailes, the Nixon campaign media specialist who became first a GOP kingmaker, and then the king of cable news, did everywhere he went.

“Divide” is a damning film, with just enough new material to entice the curious.

Before he was drowned in a tidal wave of sexual harassment lawsuits right in the middle of the 2016 Republican presidential nominating convention, with his friend and Fox-fluffed candidate Donald J. Trump about to have his GOP coronation, Ailes figured out which hot buttons to push and repeatedly pushed them, forever dividing an America eager to be re-segregated and doing it through the power of TV.

Director/interviewer Alexis Bloom found a seemingly endless parade of former colleagues, journalists who covered Ailes and ex-employees to talk about his “Divide and Conquer” view of America. Even those hired to help him “manage” the abuse and harassment crisis that brought him down speak out.

You can say, “They didn’t exactly succeed in that task, did they?”

Before his fall, Ailes “made conspiracy theories mainstream” when he agreed with their politics, perfected the art of the smear by TV political commercial and gave America’s angriest and oldest a TV channel where every fear they want to believe in is given credence, every hatred they’ve harbored for life is justified.

Bloom, the Brit who made “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks,” spends 100+ minutes exposing Ailes’ secrets, methods and meanness in a movie that is required viewing for anybody anxious to see the feature film on Ailes that’s in pre-production. John Lithgow is set to play Ailes, with Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron, Margot Robbie and Alice Eve set to play assorted Fox News members of his “harem.”

Bloom takes us back to Ailes’ childhood in Warren, Ohio, son of a union-hating union man, fierce debater and high school charmer. The accomplished character actor Austin Pendleton (“Searching for Bobby Fischer”) was a classmate and paints a portrait of the teen who became the man.

“Roger lived his whole life in fear,” Pendleton asserts. Hemophilia did that to him, and made him the greatest “chicken hawk” of them all (no military service). This personal fear “allowed him to understand the fears of other people,” and to sell those via Fox News, 24/7.

Early colleagues remember Ailes’ angling his way up the ladder at Philadelphia’s syndicated “Mike Douglas Show” in the ’60s. A certain presidential candidate appeared on the show in 1968, and Ailes made his move.

“The only person I ever saw Roger hit on was Nixon,” a fellow producer jokes. He became Nixon’s media guru, staging fake “town hall” meetings with pre-selected questions, shepherding Nixon’s TV campaign into the White House.

Ailes had the idea of a TV “network” of sorts — a means of “bypassing the critical press,” for Republicans — during the Nixon years. He wasn’t able to make that come to pass until the ’90s with Fox.

In the intervening years, he made his name as a “king maker,” masterminding media image campaigns for generations of Republicans who wanted to go to Washington. The effort it took to get the effete Mitch McConnell elected to the Senate from Kentucky is worth a laugh or two.

The TV mogul’s former star, Glenn Beck, who has “seen the light” and renounced his divisive ways, psychoanalyzes his late employer as a man “with a real terror inside him…wanting to be liked.”

“It’s easy to make somebody into a monster,” says Beck, who admits he used to “perform” on Fox, and plainly still is performing. “It’s hard to see that you’re on that path, too.”

Ailes bugged the offices and even the elevators at Fox News, kept personal files on staff and hired a private investigator, Bo Dietl, to hunt for dirt on his enemies, a man who became the classic “Friend of Roger” Fox News guest “expert.”

An actor reading Ailes’ writing spits out rage at “The New York and Hollywood elites,” something he knew he shared in common with his viewers.

“Roger always knew the lowest common denominator for people,” more than one former employee says, in various forms.

The sexual harassing? Casting couch sessions with aspiring reporters, consultants and guests? “He picked on people who needed him, not just women,” but he was hunting for validation via sex, much of the time. “He needed a harem.”

Ailes learned his TV political “optics” from Leni Riefenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will,” had a hand in every significant GOP victory from Nixon to Trump, and propositioned, bullied and coerced (often ruining those who turned him down) scores upon scores of women starting with his earliest days in TV.

Much of this isn’t new or “news,” as we’ve already heard from many of these voices — despite hundreds of millions in settlements, with the non-disclosure agreements that go along with that.

The early years, a 1960s profile by Mike Wallace, are balanced with telling later TV interviews (having a chuckle with Charlie Rose about drinking and womanizing TV journalists), all depicting a Hitchcock shaped “Master of Offense.”

Montages of the hate-filled bigotry Fox poured onto its shows about Barack Obama are hysterical, in every sense of the word.

The Willie Horton ad, the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal, the first revelations about Fox star Bill O’Reilly’s loofah madness (in 2004), the red letter dates in Ailes’s public life get their moments in Bloom’s film.

But so do his efforts to manipulate the politics of Cold Harbor, New York, where he built a mansion, bought the tiny local newspaper and tried to bully one and all into submitting to his will and his hand-picked candidates to run the place.

That didn’t work out.

Several of those interviewed note how Ailes “needed enemies” to succeed, to drive him. And he did. That’s exactly how he earned his reputation for dividing America, the crux of Bloom’s film (opening Dec. 14).

But one former “enemy” remarks how glad she was when it all came apart “while he was still alive.”

And others marvel at how Fox is exactly the same attack machine it was the day he was ousted, pointing to the America and the government Ailes left behind.

“If (Trump) hadn’t been real, Roger Ailes would have created him,” onetime Fox producer Muto cracks.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual discussion, profanity

Cast: Roger Ailes, Glenn Beck, Alyson Camerota, Pat Buchanan, many others

Credits: Directed by Alexis Bloom.  A Magnolia/A&E Indie Films release.

Running time: 1:47

Starkly beautiful, haunting and touching, “Sicilian Ghost Story” is an Italian “Endless Love,” a tale of first love and the fantasies that spin out of that when the one you’re smitten with goes missing.

Filmmakers Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza have found an arresting setting, a chilling true story and a dreamy, surreal way of approaching it in this serene and unsettling thriller.

Julia Jedlikowska is Luna, a 14 year-old with a crush on Guiseppe (Gaetano Fernandez), a sensitive, handsome and apparently rich boy from school.

She writes him love notes and they flirt in the woods on the way home. His teasing is age-appropriate, but prophetic.

“You’re not going to regret this, are you?”

He’s no sooner impressed her with his equestrian skills in the family corral, when he’s whisked away. Luna is so over the moon that she’s not quite sure what happened, but we’ve seen the cars with flashing blue lights in the background as she walks home.

Luna’s lovesickness amps up her teen revolt against her icy Swiss mother (Sabine Timoteo), but not her indulgent diabetic Dad (Vincenzo Amato). Her classmate Loredana (Corinne Musallari), the one she swaps flashlight Morse code messages, hillside home to opposite hillside home, is her only confidante.

And she needs Lore. Because Guiseppe isn’t at school. Days turn into weeks and Luna’s obsession only grows.

What happened to him? Why does his family not answer the door, or worse, chase her away? Tearful embraces from the boy’s mother are broken up, threats from Guiseppe’s grandfather are muttered.

“We’ve got nothing to do with those people,” her own mom warns (in Italian with English subtitles). “Don’t make the same mistake as me.”

Something happened involving Guiseppe’s dad. The word “supergrass”  crosses some people’s lips.

And then we see what happened to Guiseppe as the film shifts to his point of view. And it’s not a pretty scene.

What’s Sicily known for? Aside from pizza?

“Sicilian Ghost Story” plays out as a teen girl’s “Catcher in the Rye” fantasy about a love she’s never even kissed. In her dreams, she sees where he is, what happened and who did it. She can save him!

She and Loredana dye their hair blue and hand out “Where is Guiseppe?” flyers.

Time passes and Luna’s obsession only grows. In one telling moment, a hapless teacher stands by while the kids “sort” their conflicting loyalties and who gets Guiseppe’s empty desk. Knowing the people involved in his disappearance, it wouldn’t be safe to get too vocal about what happened and what’s really going on. Only Luna is brave enough to do that.

Young Jedilikowska makes Luna the sort of heroine we root for and fear for at the same time — fiery and furious, out of her depth, adamant that only she can solve this mystery and save her beloved, but losing her sanity by leaps and bounds.

The kidnapping half of the tale is all too-familiar in its cruelty and Italian state of hopelessness, and Fernandez brings a deflated despair to those scenes. Only in Luna’s mind, as she imagines him reading her plaintive love notes, is he allowed hope.

Movies set in Sicily are rare, and ones with this subject matter — cloaked in a “Ghost Story” or not — even rarer.

But Grassadonia and Piazza, who have teamed on Italian TV movies and the like, have used it to create a scenic, poetic, striking and moving thriller about Sicily’s “problem” viewed through the lens of youth and young love. The spooky overtones make its title an honest one, even if the frights are few. This is a “Ghost Story” well worth telling, and seeing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity, smoking and profanity

Cast: Julia Jedlikowska, Gaetano Fernandez

Credits: Written and directed by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, based on a Marco Mancassola short story. 

A Strand release.

Running time: 1:58

Our year of celebrating Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reaches a crescendo with “On the Basis of Sex,” a thrilling if somewhat conventional celebration of her early life and her path to the case and cause that made her reputation.

Mimi Leder’s brisk, upbeat film uses Ginsburg’s biography as a civics lesson, showing the courts as open to powerful arguments and reason (at least in the 1970s), as a reflection of a changing society — not so much leading social change as accepting it — and as Americans’ last line of defense against unfairness, injustice and despotism.

Timely? You bet. Seeing this you understand the fatal attraction of a political party wanting to steal Supreme Court seats and stack the courts to cover its tracks. Congresses and presidents are fleeting, the courts impact generations.

Felicity Jones looks little like the justice, but grows into the part as we watch this razor sharp Brooklynite rise to the occasion of her life’s work. By the time she’s making oral arguments, Jones (“Rogue One”) IS Ginsburg.

The hook that “On the Basis of Sex” hangs on, the thing that got Ginsburg’s cooperation with the film I dare say, is its depiction of a marriage of equals. She got into Harvard Law (and finished at Columbia) and onto the Supreme Court. But husband Marty Ginsburg (Armie Hammer) got into Harvard first, and a mid-law-school medical crisis put Ruth in a position of attending lectures for his courses as well as hers — doubling her education even as she was facing a crushing workload.

When Ruth, who became a law professor because no New York law firm would hire her, was hunting for the test case that might unravel sex (gender) discrimination in the nation’s courts, clever tax attorney Marty was the one who found the ingenious, back-door suit that, with his help, allowed her to change America forever.

“On the Basis of Sex” begins in the sexually-segregated 1950s, with Ginsburg’s first days at Harvard Law. Professors (Stephen Root) refuse to call on her in class. The welcome from the dean (Sam Waterston, perfect) to the nine women of her class repeatedly refers to them “taking a spot from a man.”

Ruth doesn’t need to state the obvious, but she does — “He’s not going to take me seriously.”

She’s a wife and new mother, and gives us a hint of the spitfire she will be as she outworks, out-argues and outflanks the rank sexism of hidebound Harvard.

Casting the tall, patrician Hammer hammers home Ruth’s diminutive stature and “non-traditional” marriage (by 1950s standards) they represented. Marty’s not just a sight gag or sidekick. He’s the better cook, the one who gets hired at a top firm and the one who requires nursing when he has a cancer scare. What doesn’t break Ruth makes her stronger.

The discrimination doesn’t end with her degree. One potential employer lays out the hopelessness of her pursuit of a job in New York law — “a woman, a mother and a Jew.” So she went into academia where by 1970, her protesting/rallying/agitating young students inspire her to get involved — legally — in the spirit of the changing times.

A nice parallel development — the outspoken legal academic discovers the rebel her teen daughter (Cailee Spaeny) has grown into, adding urgency to Ginsburg’s cause.

Veteran character actor Chris Mulkey (“Whiplash”) plays the skeptical litigant whose tax deduction lawsuit gets Marty’s attention, and then Ruth’s. His transformation from haggard taxpayer wronged by a sexist system into social justice warrior beautifully illustrates Ginsburg’s powers of persuasion.

Oscar winner Kathy Bates is the aged, jaded crusading attorney who has fought and lost gender discrimination suits for decades, and Justin Theroux transforms himself into Ginsburg’s pal since childhood who now runs the ACLU’s legal department, a key ally as they begin their assault on “tradition” that has kept women as second class citizens — but a hardcase who is sexist in ways he cannot see.

The villains may make what sound like reasonable arguments against “change” and “preserving the family” — arguments we hear echoed to this day. But Waterston and Root especially show how they deserve our hisses. Leder lets the courtroom arguments have the drama that comes naturally to the setting. Having mother and daughter argue at home over the ethics of Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird” underlines the conventions this script is leaning on, to good effect.

“Women have been losing the same argument for 100 years!”

If there’s a knock “On the Basis of Sex” (opening Dec. 25), it’s that the script plays it awfully safe most of the time, relying on Ginsburg’s own words to make her arguments for her and to us. Hiring a totally untested screenwriter doesn’t so much harm the picture as limit its ambitions to the conventional “feel good” moments.

But Jones, luminous in support in such dramas as “The Theory of Everything,” carries this picture, delivers thrilling arguments thrillingly and puts a warm, human face on a legal figure who has become liberalism’s Obi Wan Kenobi, “our only hope.”

“On the Basis of Sex” shows Ruth Bader Ginsburg not as an icon, but as somebody who fought for herself and the rest of us and earned that distinction, one brilliant argument at a time.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language and suggestive content

Cast: Felicity Jones, Armie Hammer, Sam Waterston, Stephen Root, n Mulkey and Kathy Bates

Credits: Directed by Mimi Leder, script by Daniel Stiepleman.  A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:00

“Ghostbox Cowboy” is a trippy culture-clash comedy, an “innocent abroad” tale of an American rube out of his depth in the new Wild West, the free-for-all that counts as a marketplace in modern day China.

It’s willfully, defiantly cryptic and pretty much impossible to cozy up to, but writer-director John Maringouin (“Big River Man”) calls to mind the early deadpan fish-out-of-water films of Jim Jarmusch (“Mystery Train”) and similar ’80s indie roadtrip fare — “Leningrad Cowboys Go America” is the most obvious analog I can think of.

Not that “Ghostbox” makes as much sense as any of those hallucinogenic antecedents. Not in the least.

Our story opens at a Love’s Interstate service station in “The American Blank Region” where a 50ish doofus (David Zellner of “Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter”) wanders the aisles in age-inappropriate slacker-wear and notices that every useless toy and tchotchke he picks up has “Made in China” on its label.

The next scene, he’s in China, a tall Texan with no accent or boots, but a ten gallon hat that announces his presence to an entire country of hustlers, one-person manufacturing firms, entrepreneurs and rule-benders, every one of them asserting China is “open for business.”

He is Jimmy Van Horn of Van Horn Global, a title tells us. And he has an idea, a dream and a “prototype.” Ghostr is a gadget to talk with the dead, a “trans-dimensional communication device.” He is sure he can pitch this, get investors, get the Ghostr made on the cheap and make his mark in the world and his fortune.

“Everyone has a dead grandmother they want to communicate with,” is his pitch.

The Specialist (that’s the name he goes by in the credits, too) is an American ex-pat too much of a “genius” to make it in America, ready to walk Jimmy through the naked fever dream of Chinese capitalism.

Specialist speaks Chinese — badly and arrogantly. If he knew what the natives — taxi drivers and others, were saying about him…

He shows Jimmy this world of hustlers, a massive flea-market looking complex where “each little stand is a factory, every floor has about 10,000 factories. and there’s 50 floors.”

He will introduce Jimmy to the shakers and movers who puts such “factories” to work making 9volt lightbox junk like Ghostr.

A running gag — every Chinese person Jimmy meets is rude, starting with the indulgently contemptuous young Chinese-Americans who have brought their trust funds to the land of their forefathers to make their fortunes.  They’ve set up shop in the Next Big Thing Economy, and being from Cleveland, are prone to correcting Jimmy’s idiotic misuse of American colloquialisms.

“These will sell like THE hotcakes” is his pitch, they try not to roll their eyes as he Texas-splains what “hotcakes” are — to guys from Cleveland who know the expression is “sell like hotcakes.”

The sea of middlemen and go betweens Jimmy must navigate includes “Swamp Donkeys,” investors with more money than common sense. Aged hippie Bob Grainger (Robert Longstreet of “Sorry to Bother You”) will help with that. Bob is CEO of FreeDentures.com, false teeth that come with wifi receivers allowing your mouth to broadcast advertising to you — the cost of “free dentures.”

“I’m gonna fast-track you in there.,” the manic, seemingly-stoned 68 year old (“I LOOK 40!”) insists. “You’re going to meet the most influential 12 year old millionaires in China!”

Bob’s rules for the China trade? “Be young and interesting. And don’t fall in love with a beautiful hooker.”

Bob, Specialist and the Chinese business people they hook Jimmy up with drink and snort and party and take meetings and share bromides that they must have read on those framed posters they sell in airline magazines.

“The usefulness of a window is not in the frame, but in the empty space that lets the light through.”

“FEAR has two meanings. Forget Everything And Run, or Face Everything And Rise.”

Jimmy has tied his fate to irate Chinese nags and thieves (stealing his idea is Job One) and to clumsy American ex-pats who launch into stoner talking jags about Chinese gerbils slaughtering eagles and spontaneously combusting mellons.

Every idea is prime investment property — bathtub gargoyles? Free Dentures? Ghostr?

“You can’t walk down the street here and not make money,” The Specialist insists. Meanwhile, the Chinese are muttering “American devils” and “idiot” at them and not even covering their mouths when they do.

“Why don’t you speak Chinese?”

Jimmy is doomed to leave one Zombieland (“America is DEAD.”) for another, the “Blank Space” of Inner Mongolia, where his journey takes him to one of those vast, fraudulent Chinese megacities, never quite finished, with nobody living there.

“Prepare to be civilized,” a loudspeaker blares.

But don’t expect to be entertained. Not a lot, anyway. Maringouin fills the screen with not quite random images of desolation, loneliness, despair and capitalism run amok.

Jimmy’s journey is meandering and seemingly largely in his own mind, even as reality sets in — he loses his money — and he finds himself playing the part of “The American Investor” in staged photos of groundbreakings, meetings with Chinese investors who’d feel more confident if an it just looks like an American is involved.

I was fascinated, but I can’t say I liked “Ghostbox Cowboy” as much as I enjoyed the films it seems inspired by. As with the Ghostr, it’s not the production of the product (“I don’t care about quality.”) that is taken seriously, but the idea.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: David Zellner, Tax Ninja, The Specialist, J.R. Cazet, Robert Longstreet, Nan Lin

Credits: Written and directed by John Maringouin.  A Dark Star Pictures release.

Running Time: 1:48

How do you debate the tolerance of a religion intolerant of criticism?

A central dilemma of our times, of the West dealing with the Islamic East.

Here’s a documentary about that issue and the core debate between Islam and the world — How can you characterize your faith as pacifist and tolerant when so much of the evidence points to the opposite being true?

Here’s an East meets and Debates West doc (Dec. 11, digital release) that promises to “go there.”

So Best Actress looks like a crowded field at the Academy Awards this awards season.

Glenn Close for “The Wife,” maybe one or both of the leads from “The Favorite” or “Mary Queen of Scots.”

But if this one works, Felicity Jones has got to have the inside track. America and Hollywood LOVES Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

This trailer for “On the Basis of Sex” finds some laughs in the very serious matter of gender equality. The film opens Christmas Day.  

Second trailer. The Millie Bobby fans have been dying for this one. Pat yourself on the back if you get the “Frankie and Johnny” musical reference.