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'Georgia'

Condensed into a synopsis, "Georgia" -- a nearly plotless story of two singing sisters -- has just about everything going against it. There hasn't been a single good study of a sisterly relationship in recent American cinema -- not including mannered extremities like "Sister My Sister" and Woody Allen's Bergman knockoffs. And there hasn't been a single good aspiring-rock-star movie in ... um, forever.

"Georgia," essentially a family project (written and co-produced by Barbara Turner, starring and co-produced by her daughter, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and daughter's best friend, Mare Winningham), brazenly combines the two near-impossible tasks and pulls them off with unexpected ease.

Contradicting its own title, the movie concentrates not on Winningham's famous folk singer Georgia Flood, but rather on her wayward sister Sadie, played by Leigh. The irony here, of course, is that Sadie can't shake off her sister's name -- whatever she does, she'll be Georgia's little sis. And she wants to do the same thing: sing.

Sadie is an eternal adolescent, with limbs wildly flailing around as she speaks and her eye shadow (all two tons of it) smeared as if she's just finished playing around with her sister's vanity.

The film opens with her moving to Seattle, where Georgia plays sold-out concert halls; Sadie tries to fit into the local rock scene. We know she's doomed: Her attention span is shorter than a Ramones song and she has an uncanny ability to piss off everybody in sight.

We follow Sadie on a string of random gigs (one of them involves her singing "Hava Nagilah" at a Jewish wedding -- a sight as surreal as anything you've seen on film) punctuated by cutaways to Georgia's sold-out performances. She stops for about a second to get married (thespian/Beastie Boy Max Perlich creates an enormously likable character in a minimal screen time), and the audience gasps in horror. Astonishingly, the marriage almost works out.

The singing career, however, doesn't, and Sadie is forced to move into Georgia's house. Georgia has obviously found solace in her fame. She's happily married; she's calm, helpful and understanding -- to the point of nausea, if we're looking at her through Sadie's eyes.

Sadie's decadence at this point becomes very peculiarly decontextualized. In full riot-grrrl getup, framed by pretty rural landscapes, Sadie is achingly alien to Georgia's house, and that alienation, absurdly, starts to render her a romantic hero. Georgia, who's always there to help when Sadie desperately DOESN'T need her, suddenly becomes the villain of the piece -- feeding off Sadie's instability, as if having this lipsticked ball of neuroses around the house is the ultimate confirmation of her own success.

Halfway through the movie, we get to an open confrontation between the Floods. Fittingly, it occurs in the form of a song. The sisters duet in a bar, trading lines back and forth (Georgia is doing her little sister a favor). It's yet another subtly twisted sight -- something like Courtney Love jamming with Joni Mitchell. The movie presents us with a choice between Georgia's streamlined, comfortable delivery or Sadie's howling curse, and then makes sure that the latter seems infinitely more respectable. We've stumbled upon the paradox of rock'n'roll credibility: It doesn't have anything to do with quality, making sincerity a virtue by itself.

Leigh creates her character out of emptiness, composing an absolutely unique endeavor, tone of voice, everything. When she sits in Georgia's house singing a twisted lullaby to her child (it takes us a second to realize that she's humming "Take a Walk On The Wild Side," using Lou Reed's lascivious "baby" as a tender call to an actual infant), it's the best one-shot encapsulation of the character I've seen in years. Sadie is the final product of rock'n'roll. She's screwed up and pitiful, and somewhere in there, she manages to remain sexy: In rock culture, the ultimate sexiness lies in artful crumbling down.

Which brings us to Sadie's climactic 8-minute-plus performance of Van Morrison's "Take Me Back." It's not as much a performance as a nervous breakdown set to a beat, and it's also an apotheosis of our culture's bent on self-expression. Sadie, even though her singing is objectively awful, creates an ultimate performance: She's unraveling the song as she's being unraveled by it, choking on a tuneless mantra "Take me way way way way way back," unknowingly infecting it with meaning. The fact that the song itself might not be worth it, only adds ironic drama.