Starring Miranda July and John Hawkes. Rated 18A. Opens Friday, July 29, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

All the lonely people, where do they all come from? The enigma of the ordinary and the isolated comes under amusingly heartfelt scrutiny in Me and You and Everyone We Know, a highly original comedy of romantic bad manners that leaves the viewer feeling inexplicably upbeat.

First-time feature maker Miranda July-a performance-art veteran who has made several short films-stars as Christine Jesperson, a suburban ditz with a video camera. She is documenting the banal facets of her everyday life, hoping to get her childlike vision into an L.A. gallery specializing in the academically avant-garde.

When not driving an "eldercab" that gets her in touch with older folks balancing love and decay, Christine develops a fixation on Richard (John Hawkes of TV's Deadwood), a goofy-looking shoe salesman recently separated from his wife (JoNell Kennedy) and struggling to hold onto his two sons, who are more interested in masquerading in adult chat rooms than playing catch with Dad.

The movie is alarmingly specific in its quirks and their political dimensions. "Is she of colour?" asks the sad-faced gallery curator (Tracy Wright) when given Christine's latest videotape, to which her earnest assistant replies, "No, but she is a woman."

Femaleness itself is called into question, as women of various ages and classes play out or resist appointed roles. A pair of self-consciously flirty teens (Natasha Slayton and Najarra Townsend) vamp a dorky neighbour (Brad William Henke) who is only able to respond with verbal foreplay-mostly in magic-marker notes-so they turn their fallacious attentions to the older of Richard's curly-haired sons (Miles Thompson). He, in turn, takes an interest in the little girl next door (Carlie Westerman), who has the no-nonsense demeanour of a 30-year-old planning her future, right down to the silverware.

With one sibling otherwise distracted, the younger brother (scene stealer Brandon Ratcliff) takes over their Internet deception. While trying to talk dirty with what may or may not be a grown "lady", he manages to reframe the conversation in terms that a seven-year-old would find comfortably kinky. Rather than describe it, perhaps we can borrow Brandon's own keyboard depiction of a favourite scatological pastime: ))< >((.

This may sound like squirm-making stuff, but in July's hands everyone is a child toying with notions of being grown-up. In what may become the film's most celebrated scene, Christine and Richard meet and walk from his store to their cars, mapping out their lives together over the geography of a single block. The strategy is both audacious and simple, and it applies to the entire movie. By stripping away the extraneous and mining essential mysteries for fun and provocation, July has come up with a unique vocabulary of hope. Maybe, she says, we only think we're lonely and could stop all that-tomorrow morning, maybe.