E-Mail This Article to a Friend Outsider art The Independent Film Festival of Boston plays on BY PETER KEOUGH
	The Independent Film Festival of Boston At the Brattle Theatre, the Somerville Theatre, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre April through May 2.

Film and music share many elements — rhythm, dissonance, harmony, a dynamic structure unfolding in time. They also share a system of production and distribution that tends to stifle and corrupt originality and creativity. Following up on the promise of its acclaimed debut last year, the Independent Film Festival of Boston offers a number of outstanding efforts that explore the conflict between artistic integrity and commercial compromise, between social conformity and creative vision.

That’s the conflict that bugs the subjects of Ondi Timoner’s DiG! (April 30 at 10 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre and May 1 at 2 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre, with the director, producer Vasco Nunes, and Brian Jonestown Massacre band member Joel Gion in attendance). Anton Newcombe, founder of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, wants no part of a corporate sellout, so he produces 11 albums independently. He also does a lot of drugs, engages the other band members in drunken, on-stage fist fights, and in general is an obnoxious megalomaniac whose premature contraction of Kurt Cobainitis guarantees that his huge talent, even genius (a retro fusion perhaps best described by the album title Her Satanic Majesty’s Second Request), will remain obscure, perhaps rediscovered long after he’s dead. "Shouldn’t you become a success first before you destroy yourself with drugs?" someone sensibly asks.

Newcombe’s counterpart — and friend and rival — is Courtney Taylor-Taylor, head of the Dandy Warhols (if the Monkees modeled themselves after the Velvet Underground instead of the Beatles, they would be the Warhols). Salieri and Mozart? Perhaps. Narrating the film with an arch insouciance, Taylor-Taylor idolizes Newcombe’s brilliance but holds his road of excess in contempt. While the Massacre are getting busted by cops on the way to a gig in Homer, Georgia, French gendarmes politely return the dope they take from the Dandys during a triumphant European tour.

Timoner began to document the two bands seven years ago in the expectation that there would be a story. And so there is, one that poses the question "Who is more successful, the defiant Massacre or the compromised Warhols?" Unfortunately, she doesn’t give us one complete song from either band (the Massacre’s performances invariably end in fistfights), so time will have to be the judge.

At least Newcombe got to choose his marginalization. "There are no freaks, misfits, and accidents. There are only things human beings do not understand." That’s the quote from writer Marlo Morgan that kicks off Big City Dick: Richard Petersen’s First Movie, by Scott Milam, Todd Pottinger, and Ken Harder (April 30 at 2:30 p.m. and May 1 at 6 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre and May 2 at 2:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, with Milam and Pottinger in attendance). What follows is indeed hard to understand: an incoherent video of a maniac in a parking lot shrieking about Johnny Mathis. The maniac is Richard Petersen, and chances are that if you met him on the street in Seattle playing "Jingle Bells," you might give him some change but wouldn’t want to borrow his sweater. The many random talents of this "real-life Rain Man" include an encyclopædic memory of all the musical cues and themesongs of the TV shows of the ’50s (Sea Hunt is a favorite). Not only can Petersen draw precise pictures of local architecture and tell you the day of the week for any date in history, he’s a musical prodigy who fuses his TV lore and his obsession with Mathis into some of the weirdest music ever made. He craves success and celebrity and acceptance like everyone else, and despite his outlandish appearance, he becomes an understandable and sympathetic character once you get to know him. The filmmakers are deft in re-creating that process of comprehension, disclosing with disarming casualness the dark truths and poignant details of their subject’s origins and fate.

Another outsider making art is animator Bruce Bickford in Brett Ingram’s Monster Road (April 30 at 12:30 p.m. and May 1 at 9 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre). At first glance, he’d seem to fit into the freak or misfit category, and at second glance too. A loner living with his Alzheimer’s-stricken father outside Seattle, he devises intricate, Boschian worlds of claymation, hundreds of figures exfoliating and collapsing together and engaging in orgies of killing and creation. Like Petersen, Bickford chafes at the futility of his career, even as he fashions works of such breathtaking strangeness that he can’t get anyone to look at them. Also like Petersen, Bickford has memories that trouble him, and an imagination that would turn perhaps to sadism and depravity if not for the release and the sublimation of his art.