Available on DVD: “Daddy Longlegs”

Ronald Bronstein (center) with Frey and Sage Ranaldo in Daddy Longlegs

Scrambling through his own life like a human incarnation of Godard’s Breathless, the protagonist of the terrifyingly funny independent feature Daddy Longlegs makes his living as a movie theater projectionist in Manhattan. Played by Ronald Bronstein, Lenny is a moth as well as a flame, a havoc generator with unlimited, unfocused energy and a staggering lack of reliable parental instincts.

Too bad: This divorced parent has two sons, with whom he spends a few weeks out of the year. As Daddy Longlegs follows Lenny’s fraught, absurdly chaotic time with his boys, as well as his sometimes-girlfriend, the writing-directing brother team Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie give us a portrait of a man careening from one verge after another.

The film was initially titled Go Get Some Rosemary, and on the festival circuit, the Safdies’ semiautobiographical work proved too unsettling for some tastes. Not mine. Unsettling doesn’t begin to describe it, but then again it’s about an unsettled, manic character whose typical week of child care arrangements, impromptu vacations upstate and other foibles might turn to melodrama or to mush in the wrong hands.

Bronstein holds it all together. The actor, also a filmmaker, made a similarly shrewd and intimate indie called Frownland; here, as Lenny, he is fantastically effective and wholly believable as a sweet and sour soul. The boys are played by Sage and Frey Ranaldo. I don’t know if what the Safdies endured growing up was akin to what audiences experience in Daddy Longlegs. But I’m very glad they survived to make a very good film about it.