Those who have spent the last three or four years following the parallel production nightmares of Fanboys and 5-25-77 would be excused for assuming that all films involving teenagers and early cuts of Star Wars films are cursed. The former, which Kevin reviewed at Comic-Con, should have been the nerd toast of summer 2007, but reshoots, reedits and a scuffle with the Weinsteins over the film’s pesky downer undercurrent mandated a number of shuffles down the calendar; it’s now tentatively scheduled to hit theaters at the end of next month. Geek excitement for 5-25-77 hit fever pitch when the film’s first trailer hit the web way back in January 2006 (and subsequently the won Golden Trailer for the best promo for a film that wasn’t actually released — yes, such an award exists). A rough cut screening (apparently, very rough) followed a year and a half later, and a year and a half after that, Patrick Read Johnson’s long MIA autobiographical epic, now simply called ‘77, had its official World Premiere this weekend at the Hamptons Film Festival, where it won a Heineken-sponsored indie auteur award. But don’t get too excited yet — it’s still not finished.

In his introduction to ‘77’s Saturday afternoon screening in the Hamptons, Johnson thanked programmer David Nugent for requesting to show the film, despite the fact that it is “still in post-production.” Johnson and crew reportedly got an influx of polishing cash earlier this year, and let’s just say we hope that polish is still in the process of being applied. In its current state, ‘77 is a good 35 minutes too long, its special effects alternate between inspired and straight dodgy, the performances are brutally uneven, it ends three or four times and it’s so drowned in source cue music that a fair deal of the dialogue is simply unintelligible. It’s a mess. But it’s kind of a fascinating mess.

Based on the filmmaker’s actual coming-of-age (which he discusses at length in this 2001 interview, when ‘77 was in the planning stages), John Francis Daley (the kid from Freaks and Geeks who kind of looks like Jon Heder, except attractive) stars as Pat, a sci-fi nerd in a teeny tiny Illinois town who, after having his world fundamentally changed by the appearance of the Star Baby at the end of 2001, goads his friends and siblings into starring in gonzo backyard sequels to that film, and Jaws (in a fake blood-filled swimming pool) and Planet of the Apes. Pat is deeply in love with cinema and maybe even talented, but without money for film school or access to a local film industry, he’s at an impasse. He tells his girlfriend Linda that he’s waiting for “alien relatives” to rescue him from rural Illinois and take him “back to a distant star system [called] Hollywood.” He gets his close encounter when his mother (Colleen Camp, in a part that Carrie Fisher reportedly turned down) arranges for him to fly out to Hollywood to meet with Herb Lightman, a failed filmmaker-turned-editor of American Cinematographer magazine. In LA for what seems like a day, under the wing of the cynical but still movie-obsessed Lightman (Austin Pendleton, in the film’s one truly solid performance), Pat stumbles into the prop shop for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, meets Steven Spielberg and special effects wizard Douglas Trumbell, and ends up seeing an early cut of the yet-to-be released Star Wars. It’s this last experience that really marks our young hero, and though the actor who plays George Lucas is mostly heard and not seen, Pat seems to find a kinship with the older filmmaker based on making fantasies real via the scrappiest means necessary (”Don’t tell anyone,” Lucas says. “We’re making this whole movie out of stuff you could find in your garage.”) Pat then goes back to his hometown and evangelizes on behalf of the upcoming space epic, via non-stop chatter and a t-shirt emblazoned with the film’s release date, 5-25-77.

Until the film’s final half-hour, where it almost feels like Johnson is so exhausted that he gives up on trying to be inventive (or maybe he just ran out of editing time) ‘77 is refreshingly free of exposition, and sometimes startlingly structurally complex. Pat’s “real” life, the movies he makes, the movies he sees, his daydreams and his nightmares are woven together almost seamlessly, with the confidence that the ideal viewer will have the cinema vocabulary to get it. And though the films referenced are by now mostly classics, there’s a strain of cinephilic discourse running throughout that can actually be fairly high-minded, and yet it’s self-reflexive enough that nothing is ever purely pretentious. It was obvious, in the cut we were shown, where the effects are finished and where they aren’t; the finished stuff looks great, the unfinished stuff looks REALLY unfinished. But on the whole. the level of ambition — and the fact that Johnson is more often than not actually able to pull off what he’s trying to do — is enough to cover for the fact that most of the performances are amateurish.

What it can’t cover for is the narrative’s spraw. There’s enough plot here for several episodes of CW-quality drama, and aside from the actual trip to Los Angeles, none of it feels like it’s operating at stakes higher than your average episode of teen-friendly TV. It seems smart to reserve further judgement until the film is finished, but one hopes that Johnson finds the distance he needs to whittle his passion project down to its core. Under the miasma of autobiography (which covers everything from young Pat’s car troubles to the loss of his virginity), it seems like within ‘77 there’s an earnest love letter, somehow both audience-friendly and totally formally experimental, to the birth of mass cinemania, the moment when sci-fi nerds in small towns around the world found the franchises that would make their obsessions seem more normal, that would make all these alien(ated) teenagers feel connected to one another through film. Johnson just needs to find it.