In Tetro, a young man in his late teens named Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich) arrives at the Buenos Aires doorstep of his long-disappeared brother "Tetro" (Vincent Gallo) and immediately begins making waves. He wants to know why Tetro ran off and never returned for him, and what any of this may have to do with their father, whom Bennie knows little to nothing about.

Tetro turns out to be extremely bitter about his past and has vowed never to have anything to do with his family again, and therefore treats Bennie rudely as an unwanted guest; meanwhile, Bennie returns the favor by snooping through Tetro's private things to find out more about what happened. This is a rather dislikable scenario and it takes a long time for Tetro to warm up. We are given hints that some horrible family secrets are being kept and are expected to find this automatically intriguing; eventually, along with Gallo's character, the movie opens up and reveals itself to be about the pains that come with being part of a creatively gifted family.

Director Francis Ford Coppola has claimed this to be a personal story, having similarly come from an artistic family of Italian background, and he shows it by dressing up his film with every artsy brushstroke he knows -- the movie's in sharp black-and-white and impeccably shot (by Mihai Malaimare Jr.) with flashback scenes in lesser aspect ratio and worn-out color, and he throws in bits of ballet metaphors to help illustrate the emotional messes of his protagonists. Much of this actually makes Tetro a bit tough to get into, but credit for holding our interest should go mainly to Maribel Verdú as Tetro's live-in girlfriend, our motherly guide to the proceedings, and Gallo himself, whose character starts out as a jerk but shows an undeniably inviting presence when he's in a good mood, one that might return permanently once he relocates a place in his own family (meanwhile, Ehrenreich's main appeal comes from his uncanny resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio).

The movie also has something to say about the fulfillment of art not coming from commercial success or the approval of others, but from a personal sense of completion, something we'd easily feel coming directly from Coppola, now into making these little self-produced projects (like his last one, Youth Without Youth) away from the major studios. They come off as a bit indulgent but also welcomely intimate, small yet polished alternatives to the mainstream.

(Released by American Zoetrope and rated "R" for language, some sexuality and nudity.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.