Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Vincent Gallo and Alden Ehrenreich. In English and Spanish with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, November 13, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Does it help or hinder to know that Francis Ford Coppola is here directing from his own script for the first time since The Conversation, in 1974? Tetro is even more personal, dealing with multiple generations of a big, creative Italian-American family, and yet it's also as impersonal as opera at its stagiest.

Newcomer Alden Ehrenreich plays Bennie, turning 18 and in Argentina to look up his much older brother (Vincent Gallo), a failed writer now called Tetro, after the family name, Tetrocini. That handle is an odd choice for someone avowing the desire to cut all ties with his father (Klaus Maria Brandauer, seen in flashbacks), a famous conductor who made genius a dirty word for his sons.

Tetro has had a run of bad luck, starting with the loss of his opera-singing mother in violently Oedipal circumstances. And all that cigarette-smoking doesn't help. But he has found true love in the form of Spain's substantial Maribel Verdú.

The hermetically sealed tale, which also features Carmen Maura as an all-powerful theatre critic, gets sillier as it limps, tangos, howls, and stumbles along for a rather long 127 minutes. Aesthetically, however, it charms. The gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, which moves from poetically slummy Buenos Aires to glistening Patagonia, is punctured by occasional bursts of muted colour. References to dance-and-music films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are more than implied; The Tales of Hoffman is excerpted and then re-created in new settings. As long as you're up for a game of spot-the-homage, Tetro is good cinematic fun. Just be sure to check the rest of your brain at the door.