Short and feature veteran Guy Maddin is labeled visionary by some, and My Winnipeg embodies the advantages and drawbacks of such. Vision, that is, may be so personal as to be suggestive but at bottom incommunicable. Set to a sleepwalker’s dirty-window train journey through, and out of, the director’s lifelong hometown, the self-styled “docu-fantasia” burrows into the past of the title city and of an individual’s family; for eighty minutes a train-rider narrator muses on what seems undeniable fact laid side by side with what must surely be the created myth of memory.

The deadpan not differentiating between grainy real and grainy re-created historical footage mixed with digital imaging, shadow animation, and actors rehearsing lines to be repeated later in artificially mounted settings within what are purported to be the actual places, the unusual film is one man’s confronting his own love-hate relationship with childhood and with the quirky capital and its path to a modernity of “permanence as well as of development and change.”

The difficulty, and the obstacle to any wide general appeal, lies in what the Guy Maddin/narrator’s (Darcy Fehr) “most psychic of all Winnipeggers” mother (South Carolinian B-leading lady of sixty years ago, Ann Savage) calls “euphemisms,” or highly personal interpretations hidden beneath surfaces. Emphasized by sexually fraught simulations of “real” circle-framed old movie séances, the Forks is frequently brought up, the rail-station confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers that First Nations/Native Indians legend insists lies over other, subterranean Forks. Like the now-closed two lower gender-segregated levels of the municipal pool, there are physical and mental depths below in this cold, snowy, windy black-and-white of dreams, sleepwalkers and ghosts.

Ostensibly the narrator and his voice -- he is also the suicidal Ledge Man of the city’s long running, locally made TV series -- revisits the place and the past to come to terms with them and thus be freed and able to escape to a somewhere else. But it’s “so hard to remember . . . who is alive anymore. I forget my dead brother Cameron (Brendan Cade); I forget my father, dead since I was twenty-one,” and so the original structure at 800 Ellis Avenue is sublet for a month, there to have actors re-enact a few meticulously logged scenes from a “1963-ish” past when it was odorous mother Lil’s Beauty Shop plus his immediate family and grandparents’ split-level residence.

Some of these re-enactments explain -- as much as loose memory can be -- opening rehearsed lines, such as sister Janet’s (Amy Stewart) suspected loss of virginity to either of two unseen men; others hint at different sexual awakenings, like a consideration of the effects of a workers’ strike on St. Mary’s Academy for Girls. And nearer the end, still other, non-family-centered re-creations point towards disillusionment as Winnipeg updates and consigns its imagined bucolic past to the literal and metaphorical wrecker’s ball -- Eaton’s huge downtown department store, Happy Land amusement park, the revered Arena, the Bay and its corrupt beefcake Golden Boy contests, the detritus from some of which forms sledding-dangerous Garbage Hill or homeless squatters’ rooftop shelters.

Enough certifiable figures appear -- Conan Doyle seeking ectoplasm and words from a dead son, or Winnipeg’s own pre-mask puck-scarred NHL Hall of Fame goalie Terry Sawchuk -- to make semi-believable the zany unfamiliar crew around them, the venal bearded mayors, viscounts, mystics, clairvoyants and brothel madams celebrated in street names, the grotesque heads of horses frozen in the river, the septuagenarian wraiths in Maroons uniforms doing hockey battle with equally defunct, sold-to-glory-money Falcons and Jets. It makes no difference what is “real,” what not, whether the Arlington Street Bridge was once to span the Nile, or if the officially unrecognized backstreets are truly preferred pathways, or “negative” footprints survive as “snow fossil positive records.”

“All is lost,” observed Scott Fitzgerald, “save memory,” which creates a portion of what one thinks he remembers. My Winnipeg melds myth and memory, fact and fancy, classical Hermes and colloquial Golden Boy, until they are inseparable. The starting-point family aspect, in particular its strong-willed mother figure, is not resolved by a symbolic icy embrace, and the latter part of the film turns too easily to rant against the selling of the cherished past to a rush to modernity.

The mélange of labor unrest, play 1942 Nazis, centenarian scavenger hunts with a never-claimed prize of a ticket out of town, spectral citizens, all is in fun yet serious, the Swinging Strings’ “Wonderful Winnipeg” balanced against Citizen Girl’s (Kate Yacula) promised restorations. “Thanks for the memories” is painted on a doomed Arena’s wall, but they are in the end private potpourri, and, like stream of consciousness, one man’s vision is another’s poison. Although the art-house crowd and select Manitobans may stay the course to empathize, the multiplex masses probably will not.

(Released by IFC Films; not rated by MPAA.)