As we all have come to learn, New Orleans owns no middle ground. Either it’s up, way up, or it’s down, down, down. Like the blues. Like jazz itself. It’s the hub of a culture that leans on storytelling like a drunk slumped against a Bourbon Street lamp post. “My brother married the headless woman from the circus,” a Shreveport-born, New Orleans denizen once said out loud in a Crescent City honky-tonk bar. That’s just the way it is. The way it is, in fact, down there off the bayous and the tepid water of the Gulf Coast, can get pretty scary. As it does when John Maringouin, in the process of writing the screenplay of Self, returns home to interview his father, who in good Louisiana fashion, once tried to kill him. Johnny Roe, pére, is a reclusive Dadaist painter, career junkie, street-fighting pimp and accused murderer. He is a New Orleans local legend. With their 1960s heyday long over, Johnny and his common-law wife, Marie (he’s 6’6” to her 4’9”) now live as shut-ins amidst the relics of the past in a gothic, suburban, Louisiana tract community called Terrytown. They swing madly from love to hate, sobriety to horrific intoxication, so it’s no surprise that when son John shows up to capture it all on film, the doors come off their hinges. A descent into the past rapidly becomes littered by family lore, drugs, murder and true love, revealing the horrible truths of a history that neither father nor son are ready to look at, much less accept. There’s a grave down there in the bayou for everyone, but in this odyssey, this part documentary and part dramatic narrative makes good on “family,” makes good (or does it?) on the love that binds us all together.