Linas Phillips can make a film out of almost nothing. His first feature, Walking to Werner, was a road-trip movie without a car. It told the story of his journey from Seattle to Los Angeles on foot, to meet his artistic hero Werner Herzog, who had once walked from Munich to Paris to visit someone, except that Phillips hadn't even made a date with Herzog—he just hoped he'd be home. "The fact of the stunt—ludicrous, maniacal, edging on embarrassing both for its egotism and its idolatry—would have overwhelmed the film had it not been for the people Phillips encountered along the way," Annie Wagner wrote in The Stranger in 2007, in a profile we published the week Phillips got a Stranger Genius Award. The people Phillips encountered along the way included a young woman desperate to get Phillips to give his life over to Christ and a man who was convinced that Phillips was a woman (he had long hair at the time) who needed to watch out or risk getting raped alongside the road. The film was an experimental documentary of sorts—tonally beautiful, sociologically revealing, improvisational, quixotic, unexpectedly funny, and formally smart. Phillips even repurposed director commentaries from Herzog DVDs to make it sound like Herzog was describing Phillips's quest.

His second feature, Great Speeches from a Dying World, was another experimental documentary—footage of homeless men and women reciting speeches delivered by famous politicians and thinkers.

And his third feature, Bass Ackwards, which premiered at SIFF and opens this week at Northwest Film Forum, is less of a documentary than the first two, though it is another improvisational film about a filmmaker named Linas, a road trip he takes, and the people he meets along the way (these people are mostly played by actors, but most of the actors describe and act out things that have actually happened—to them—in real life).

After getting dissed by a married girl he loves in spite of himself, Phillips decides to leave Seattle for Boston, where his parents live (the parents in the film are his real parents), to stay with them for a while until he can figure out the next step in his life. He undertakes the journey in a 1976 VW bus that's had the middle taken out of it, the front and back now welded together into the most hilarious little vehicle you've ever seen. In the film, he finds the miniaturized VW on an alpaca farm on Vashon Island. (In actuality, he found it in Mountlake Terrace, through Craigslist.) The alpaca farm on Vashon Island exists—it's also where Phillips shot a music video for Grand Archives—and the alpaca farmer in the film runs the same farm in real life. The speech he gives Phillips about baby alpacas sometimes being ignored by their mothers, and how there is little he can do about it because he's learned that alpacas have amazing instincts, came from an actual conversation Phillips and the farmer had. "If there's something wrong with their baby, they just know, and they don't waste any time on them."

The obvious echo—that there's something wrong with Phillips, and that's why life is just not working right for him—is mercifully made only in the viewer's mind. The closest we get to exposition is when Phillips is trying to feed one of the alpacas (it looks like a miniaturized llama, with a big brown rag-doll head and gray ears) and he says to the creature while holding a bowl of food behind his back: "You can have some, just tell me you love me. C'mon. Tell me you love me, that's all. And then you can have it. No, first tell me that you love me." The alpaca walks away.

How Phillips manages to make a movie about himself starring himself not annoying is worth trying to figure out. I want to say it's because he never once flatters himself—ill-advised facial hair, V-necked shirts that result in him getting V-shaped sunburns on his flabby bare chest, scene after scene of him basically coming across as an inarticulate loser. (For example, he gets invited to a stranger's house for dinner, and the man of the house asks him what he does for a living and Phillips replies, "Uh, good question, I dunno. I used to take care of kids, but now I'm trying to make films and stuff so..." His voice trails off. The man asks, "Do you have anything to fall back on in case that doesn't work out?") But it's not only that. The cinematography in Phillips's films is out-and-out gorgeous (this one's shot by Sean Porter), and the people Phillips surrounds himself with in his movies are, brilliantly, always more fascinating than he is.

In Bass Ackwards, his VW breaks down and Phillips meets an auto mechanic who seems to have been made crazy by a personal pain related to the death of his daughter. The auto mechanic is played by Paul Lazar—a character actor most known for small roles in Jonathan Demme films, most notably The Silence of the Lambs—whom Phillips knows because Lazar's wife was a choreography teacher of Phillips's at NYU. Unlike the other characters Lazar has played, the torment this character is going through comes from Lazar's own world. Suddenly, the film isn't about Phillips at all.