Starring Terence Nance and Namik Minter. Unrated. Opens Thursday, June 20, at the Vancity Theatre

This diaristic scrapbook is a coat of psychedelic colours for young filmmaker Terence Nance, who decided to woo his paramour with movies, not flowers. Using degraded video clips, stop motion, and altered film effects à la Norman McLaren, and a welter of animation styles (supplied by other artists), the bushy-haired Nance tells of his failed relationships with remarkably similar-looking women drawn from Brooklyn’s lively black-Bohemian culture—something we’ve seen too little of since Spike Lee’s maiden effort, She’s Gotta Have It.

Things are more closely focused on Namik Minter, a charismatic beauty he’s determined to impress. That’s the core, anyway, of the short he completed in 2010 and called “How Would You Feel?” This 90-minute feature is built around the older film and acknowledges the limitations (and flattery) implied by the new title. Nance is a hyperarticulate writer, underlined by having his stentorian narration read, mostly, by The Wire’s Reg E. Cathey. This time he includes more of Minter’s POV, drawing on her own unfinished project in which she ponders the hard-to-control electricity that runs “when someone of consequence invades your sightlines”.

It’s difficult to say how autobiographical their on-screen personas really are. Minter insists she’s elsewhere in an “exclusive” relationship, but these two look pretty chummy together. And Nance’s mantra about his emotional unavailability comes into question when we realize just how much of the guy we’re getting! But content isn’t king in Beauty. The endlessly fragmented form, with sequences interrupting and commenting on each other, is an exercise in jazzy compound structures, supported by the shifting snippets of similarly eclectic music. The film’s loopiness may not be for all viewers, but it gives plenty of big-hearted (and -haired) inspiration to those yearning to move from the friend zone to the art zone.