Socially inept garbageman Simon Grim’s (James Urbaniak) life changes forever when a mysterious stranger shows up at his house and encourages him to write: Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), a self-proclaimed genius forging a masterful memoir who is really a sex offender on probation from prison. As the garbageman produces a poem that tremendously moves some but is dismissed as pornographic and scatological by others, Henry scraps with and leers at Simon’s chronically depressed mother Mary (Maria Porter) and his bored, unemployed sister Fay (Parker Posey).

The darker Hal Hartley film, Henry Fool meets all the indie director’s rich lyricism and charming style with more confronting subjects, gross-out humour, a pre-millennium harshness and an ensemble of deeply flawed characters – some unforgivable. What emerges from this compelling mix is an absurd, sad and sincere empathy for this band of listless lost souls as they linger about, create and destroy, support and hurt each other in a messy world that far outpaces them – or in a strange turn of fate, stops to listen.