Finishing Heaven begins in a bodega. A tall, thin, older woman with fire engine red dyed hair and a drawn face saunters to a table in the back of the deli section to greet a shifty-looking mustachioed character with whom she is clearly very well acquainted. They kiss hello, and almost immediately fall into an argument about matters that date back nearly four decades. it’s a bizarre scene, for a lot of reasons, but initially, I couldn’t get beyond the setting: why are these two in a bodega? They didn’t come for the food––she walked in with a half-empty venti Frappucino, and a wide shot reveals that the deli’s heat lamp trays are empty, thus signifying that it’s either very early or very late. If you were to meet an old lover to argue about old Warhol superstars and reminisce about Max’s Kansas City, would you really do it in front of the soft drink case at your circumspect corner grocery?

Director Mark Mann presents us this scene with judiciously inserted explanatory on-screen titles, through which we learn that the man’s name is Robert Feinberg, and the woman’s is Ruby Lynn Reyner, and the two were a couple in the 70s and are now reuniting for the first time in over 30 years to talk about finally making some progress on Heaven, a film which he directed and she starred in but he never finished editing. In spite of this exposition, overall it feels like we’re being thrown into a fire, and it’s exciting––sometimes you see things happening in Manhattan that you can’t quite explain and simply must accept, and you come to understand that it’s just one of the ways that the city humbles you into acknowledging that you do not control the universe. But then we cut to an exterior shot of the deli’s incongruously sunny exterior, and a title slowly fades up at the bottom of the screen: “Formerly Max’s Kansas City.”

It’s a laugh line, but it’s also an object lesson in how the director will proceed to tell this story. He asks us to jump straight in to one aspect of his subjects’ lives, and just as we think we have a handle on what’s going on, he pulls out and unpacks another box, unveiling a further facet of who these people are and what their relationship is all about. It’s a film that, on the top level, is about two extreme personalities trying to finish a film, but on a deeper level, it’s about the way lives slip out of control, dreams slip out of reach, and the incredible way that massive egos can take repeated beatings and continually bounce back, worse for wear but still resillient.

“I was really, like, a boy wonder,” Feinberg brags, explaining how he came, at the age of 22, to shoot 16 hours of “beautiful” 16mm footage under the tutelage of Martin Scorsese. It was 1970, and Feinberg and the then-gorgeous performance artist Reyner were “the Romeo and Juliet” of lower Manhattan. They met at Max’s; it was a one night stand that lasted five tumultuous years, all sex and art and fury and heroin in a halcyon swirl. But of course such beautiful horror couldn’t last––as Reyner put it during the film’s Q & A here last night, the couple was in Italy when Robert “said, ‘I’m leaving you and going to Brazil with another woman.’ And I helped him pack.”

37 years later, Feinberg still has the footage, and it’s still unedited. The cans of films are just another lump of stuff in his hoarders paradise of a Northern California shack, ignored while Feinberg spends his days mopily chain smoking through various odd jobs. He’s fallen far from the days of boyish wonder. “I’m basically unemployable,” he deadpans. “I’m really happy when I get through the day and I haven’t fucked up too bad.”

Reyner, though visibly ravaged by years of hard living, is doing a little bit better in terms of spiritual confidence, but her insistence that Feinberg move back to New York and finally finish the film isn’t an act of charity: for both of them, everything that’s happened since she helped him pack that suitcase has taken them further and further away from both their youthful dreams of art stardom and the notion of all-consuming love. Finishing Heaven isn’t really about finishing Heaven as much as it’s about the idea that most of us really only get a handful of really good years, where possibilities seem infinite and we can actually just live without hearing a clock ticking or falling into a pit of regret. And when those years run out, you can either deal with it and recalibrate your life expectations, or you can spend the rest of your life fetishizing that hottest moment. Robert and Ruby have been doing the latter, and as mortality starts to creep in to Ruby’s life, Heaven becomes a symbol of her desperate but also kind of heroic need to recapture that moment, even if remotely, even if just for a little while.

But of course, Ruby and Robert aren’t in control of this document, and Mann and producers David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro aren’t in the charity business, either. It took Feinberg forty to years to figure out what he had in those film cans, and similarly, I’m not quite convinced that the filmmakers know exactly what they have here. The press notes reference the fact that the director and the producers had quite a bit of strife along the way to last night’s world premiere. They obviously think this is an important part of the story of the film if they’re going out of their way to let journalists in on it, but it complicates the already problematic issue of what this film is really about, where its meat is, what’s really at stake. The weight of the thing isn’t coming from Heaven, because Mann doesn’t work hard enough at convincing us that it would be a tragedy if it went unfinished. It seems clear that the director, the sibling producers, and each of the subjects are each trying to capitalize on this beast from their own individual corners armed with entirely self-serving agendas, but this battle between opportunists is just a lot less interesting than the story of Ruby and Robert’s lives as seen on screen.

Ultimately, I wonder if my favorite thing that Finishing Heaven manages is even on the agenda of its makers. At first, it seems like it’s going to be a sort of remarriage comedy––as if finishing Heaven is just a pretense for these two starcrossed odd balls to get back together––but it ends up going much deeper. Mann slowly, carefully reveals that Ruby and Roberts lives just end up being too organically complicated to hew to the facile cliches of the crowd-pleasing relationship doc. Finishing Heaven, in its way, becomes a post-mortem on both romance and youthful romanticism, a bittersweet accounting of the havoc wrecked on fates by the passage of time.

A “work in progress” screening of Heaven, now titled Heaven Wants Out, will take place here at LAFF on Saturday night. More info here.