Lena Dunham’s SXSW Emerging Visions entry Creative Nonfiction is exactly that — an Emerging Vision. It’s the early and somewhat unformed work of a clearly ambitious artist (22 year-old Dunham wrote, directed and stars in a dual role in the film, which was shot on video and 16mm over the course of several years, beginning when she was a junior at Oberlin College and making extensive use of that school’s dorm rooms as sets) who seems to know what she wants to say, which is something of a feat in itself. If she doesn’t quite manage to actually say it in this, her first feature, if her enthusiasm for the language and possibilities of cinematic comedy seem to outweigh her grasp of tools and technique, she proves herself as someone to watch, as a conceptual artist and as a comedienne.

Dunham plays Ella, a liberal arts student working on a screenplay while simultaneously navigating an ambiguous relationship with a male friend who has started sleeping in her dorm room bed. Her screenplay is about a high school girl (played in 16mm fantasy sequences by Dunham herself) who has an affair with her professor, who eventually kidnaps her and holds her captive in a cabin, where she’s forced to type at a typewriter all day. It’s understandable that those who read the script are surprised that the teacher never gives the student a sexual education — this makes more sense when we learn that Ella herself is a virgin. But virginity is a burden Ella is eager to give up, in the name of getting to the next step in both her art and her life.
One of the greatest virtues of Creative Nonfiction is that such impulses and the ensuing stabs at experience aren’t clouded in the filmmaker’s mind by decades of distance, and thus are dramatized with neither nostalgia nor false weight. The fantasy sequences (which also star Eleonore Hendricks of The Pleasure of Being Robbed) and “reality” are differentiated not just by source stock, but by staging, performance and shooting style. Though the 16mm material is fairly polished and cinematic, the footage of Ella’s real life is shot on video so shaky and zoom-crazed, with frequent blocking problems and glances at the camera, that in contrast it seems that it must be intended as a parody of home movie filmmaking. It also helps that although Dunham goes in for a fair amount of nudity in Nonfiction, it’s done completely without pretense, and in most cases with humor obviously intended. Dunham’s body, “normal” in way that women’s magazines try to use the word to make its readers feel better about their imperfections, is a part of her comic characterization. All in all, it’s realism, but with a wink, and it’s often hiarious.

It’s a tricky tone, one which almost guarantees that Nonfiction’s insights will sit on its surface. Dunham seems to want to comment on the comedy and irony of young, precocious artists trying to make work that will define their careers before they’ve lived enough of a life to inform it. But the irony of Creative Nonfiction ends up being that, much like her character, Dunham is able to set various narrative and stylistic wheels in motion without imbuing them with much meaning. Like its protagonist, who makes gestures towards articulating her desires but rarely actually communicates what she means, the film seems to point at what it wants to be without every actually fully getting there. It’s the rare a case where a fusion of form and content doesn’t strengthen the work, but makes it feel like that much more of a sketch.

But if Nonfiction, barely feature-length at 60 minutes, lacks the clarity that comes from experience in either life or art, it’s still by all means worth seeing as a big-screen coming out party for Dunham herself. Beyond her directorial interest in social and sexual mores and the anatomy of awkwardness (not to mention the awkwardness of anatomy), the filmmaker has honed her on-screen persona across two webseries and ten short films, some made in combination with Josh Safdie, Sam Lisenco and the rest of the Red Bucket Films team. Dunham is now out of college and turning her loving but biting gaze from the art vs. life crises of college coeds to the art vs. life crises of New York City art world wannabes — her latest webseries, Delusional Downtown Divas, is both structurally tighter and thematically crazier, and is ample evidence that Dunham’s vision is more compelling the further it emerges.