NEAR THE END of this film, the narrator and hero (Billy Crudup, who is simply known as Fuckhead) is informed by a jaded Dennis Hopper, his roommate in a drug rehab center, that each of his three ex-wives has at one time shot him. "And you are still alive?" asks Fuckhead, with great wonder.

"Now that's a stupid question. Of course I'm still fucking alive. I'm here ain't I?"

"But I meant alive in the deeper sense. You could be talking and walking and be dead in the deeper sense."

What is crucial about this scene is the idea of a "deeper sense," meaning a sense of things beyond what we see, beyond the visible, beyond the tangible surface. This remarkable film is all about that sense of depth, or, more closely, the puzzle of depth. What Jesus' Son addresses at every moment, in every shot, is the great question of philosophy and literature: What makes existence both trivial and all-important?

Director Alison Maclean (Crush) uses two devices to lay bare this central theme. First, she employs a loose narrative that's motivated by associations rather than a logical and hierarchical plot progression. This loose narrative democratizes Fuckhead's memories, so that the profound moments stand next to the most inconsequential and irrelevant ones. Second, she frames much of the film in deep focus, thus giving great detail and density and depth to the thin surface of Fuckhead's world, which is composed of ordinary, mass-produced consumer products like suburban homes, cheap beer, folk cars, fast food, and clothes manufactured in developing countries.

In the end, Jesus' Son beautifully captures the very twilight of life, that strange space humans occupy between what the French mathematician and philosopher Pascal described as "the very small and the very large"; between everything and nothing; between possible and impossible; between abundance (the surreal) and emptiness (the existential).

"There are these white birds that float on water, I forgot their name," a stranger says, midway through the movie.

"You're are talking about swans, and they mate for life," Fuckhead responds.

"I don't care who they mate for," replies the man. But Jesus' Son does care. It wants more than the surface of the fuck; it wants to know who we mate for, grow for, and ultimately die for.