Richard Crouse

“Acidman,” a new family drama starring Thomas Haden Church and Dianna Agron and now playing in theatres, is a quiet, and sometimes disquieting, essay on a broken father and daughter relationship.

Maggie (Dianna Agron), a thirtysomething engineer on the verge of divorce, hasn’t had much contact with her father Lloyd (Church) a.k.a. Acidman, for decades, ever since he abandoned his career and family when she was a teen.

A reclusive, he lives rough, in a rundown trailer in the Pacific Northwest. “It’s a good place to be left alone,” he says. When he isn’t writing and recording discordant industrial music using the junk that fills his place as instruments, he is attempting to make first contact with UFOs. “Technically,” he says, “they are IFOs because we’ve identified them.”

Maggie travels thousands of miles by plane, train and automobile to reconnect with her father, to check in on him—“When is the last time you went to the doctor?”—and to gain some understanding of his reasons for leaving her behind. In understanding his abandonment, she also hopes to gain some clarity on her dissolving marriage.

“How long are you planning on staying,” Lloyd asks. “I guess I could have picked up a little, if I had known you were making the trip.”

As they get reacquainted on UFO sighting trips with Lloyd’s dog Migo, Maggie comes to realize the depth of her father’s alienation, but finds cracks in his hardened veneer that reveal the man she once knew.

“Acidman” is the study of a relationship in progress. Lloyd and Maggie are strangers, tied by biology and faded memories.

Their tentative attempts at making a true connection are poignantly played by Argon and Church. There isn’t an ounce of sentimentality on display, just two broken people searching for a path forward. This isn’t a story where the characters emerge at the end of the movie radically changed. Instead, the way they grapple with the past, pushes them into the future.

Director Alex Lehmann keeps things simple. The melodrama is on the downlow, which allows the chemistry between the two lost souls in the leads develop slowly and naturally until their fractured relationship finds its comfort zone. It’s an intimate two-hander that takes patience from the viewer, but pays off with a feeling of gentle authenticity.