Unstrung Heroes

When Steven Lidz's mother falls ill the house stops being a bearable place, and the boy moves in with his two eccentric uncles. Their apartment is full of hoarded objects, conspiracy theories and rules of their own; they read the world differently from everyone else. There Steven learns something he could not learn at home: how to live alongside pain, and that resembling yourself is not a defect. This was Diane Keaton's first feature in fiction. Richard LaGravenese wrote the screenplay from the journalist Franz Lidz's own memoir. The film screened at Cannes in 1995. Thomas Newman's score was the only Academy Award nomination it received. Andie MacDowell and John Turturro play the parents, Michael Richards and Maury Chaykin the two uncles, and Nathan Watt, as the boy, is the actual centre of the film.