This is one of the few films I’ve walked in to knowing almost nothing about. And now I get to ruin that experience for you. Writer/director/lead actress Miranda July is a real-life performance artist starring in her first feature as a performance artist named Christine. Christine makes a living as an Eldercab driver, a job well-suited for her sensitive personality. She falls for Richard, a recently-separated shoe salesman who tells himself he is eager for “amazing things” but is hesitant to give in to the moment. His two boys goof around in adult chat rooms, cutting and pasting phrases from the on-screen dialog to craft bizarre conversations they don’t really understand. While the younger brother Robby invents hilarious new emoticons, the teenage Peter is targeted by a couple of sexually curious neighbor girls. His own interests lie in another girl who would kill at The Price Is Right, a walking database of consumer appliances. With the story almost supplanted by character sketches, Me and You and Everyone We Know reminded me of Napoleon Dynamite on first impression. The characters are both understated and overly quirky, and their world is bright and iconic. Even the scores are somewhat alike, but that’s where the similarities end. While Napoleon’s cast acted like naive children, here things are turned around. The grown-ups try to cope with loneliness and the complexities of relationships, while the kids stoically act out the very adult situations our accelerated culture prematurely pushes them toward. A few scenes are both laugh-out-loud funny and cringe-inducing. At one point I braced myself for an underage Brown Bunny scenario, which thankfully played out off-screen. The movie also has some tender moments, transforming the accidental death of a goldfish and a simple walk down a city sidewalk into deep reflections on human connections. It’s a refreshing and original movie, which should at least be seen to learn what ))<<>>(( means.

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