Jeremiah Zagar’s In a Dream premiered at SXSW in 2008, two months before Synecdoche, NY was unveiled at Cannes, but seen in the run up to its release in New York on Friday, Zagar’s family documentary pops out as a true-life analogue to Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut. Dream’s counterpart to Caden Cotard is Isaiah Zagar, the filmmaker’s father and a mosaic mural artist who, in the film’s earliest frames, confesses to an attraction to the “gigantic.” As In a Dream unfolds (in three parts, detailing Jeremiah’s parents’ courtship and formation of a family life around the patriarch’s art practice, the eventual threats to their way of life and ultimately its tentative rebirth), more Synecdoche similarities emerge. Like the protagonist of Kaufman’s masterwork, Isaiah Zagar deals with the internal by projecting it on the external, making an art work that conquers a city, that blurs the line between public space and domestic, and that never ends. His work becomes an addiction that unwittingly distances him from the people he loves. Both films even feature protagonists who handle their own feces. Oddly enough, it’s the indie documentary, not the studio-released drama with an ensemble full of stars, that points to the possibility of a happy ending.

Isaiah and wife Julia got together after art school; as the eventual matriarch explains it, she chose a mate who was “crazy and self absorbed but, you know, amiable.” After a breakdown and suicide attempt in his late 20s, Isiah turned from painting and drawing to large-scale mosaic; as he puts it, his reentry into life was dependent on learning how to put “one thing next to another.” Using paint and tile to visualize the story of his life (and life with Julia), he first covered their entire home with a wall-to-wall, floor to ceiling work of narrative art. Then the couple began buying dilapidated buildings in middling parts of Philadelphia to restore and rent out, each one serving as Isaiah’s next canvas. They had two children. As Julia says, they spent the next several decades “in a dream … making family, making business, making children, making art — making life.”

We know virtually from the start that this will be a story in which the central couple will fracture. Julia refers to Isaiah in the past tense — “he loved me” — and Isaiah mournfully notes, “You learn a lot when you lose something.” Things get weird when Isaiah, in a talking head-ish setup, rather casually but in graphic detail admits to having been molested as a child. His son cuts this story with imagery of a fish being gutted, then follows up this truly uncomfortable sequence with a montage, narrated by his mother, explaining how a faux-innocent sexual openness pervades Isaiah’s adult work and life. Ancient home movie footage backs up Julia’s claim that her husband had a bad habit of “smooching” strangers,which the wife has clearly never been able to fully accept or condemn. When it happens, she says, “I just walk away.”

All of this foreshadowing is still hardly preparation for the blunt blow dealt by Isaiah to both audience and spouse when he admits that he’s crossed the already blurry boundary of their marital relationship. In a Dream is light on the techniques of direct cinema; Zagar is wise to pull out the verite only when he really needs it, as when his mother is reacting to the news that her partner has suddenly called time out on the alliance that was supposed to carry them into an infinite future. Wedged in the middle of a film that largely rolls along like a zoetrope, with seamlessly blended still and moving imagery scored for maximum dreaminess, this presentation of real life suddenly happening and intruding on best laid plans and self-actualized fantasies is appropriately shocking.

It’s an accident of release date and unfair to either film, but it’s hard encapsulate what’s exciting about In a Dream without referring to my previous writing on Synecdoche. It’s hard to ignore that these are both films in which the passions that drive creative work and romantic love become confused, fused into if not influenced by a kind of madness. But this is not to say that Zagar has made a film without its own identity, and its charms are unique. In a Dream doesn’t have the bravado/ego to conflate one man’s death with the crumbling of the universe; it’s a much more intimate story, but within its small space, consequences of the artist’s actions seem to reverberate louder. And unlike Synecdoche, it’s mostly told not from the unreliable tunnelvision of the self-absorbed artist, but from the family on the sidelines, which his self-absorbed tunnelvision smashes into pieces.

Cue the mosaic metaphor … again. If In a Dream has a recurrent weakness, it’s that the filmmaker seems to too often fall back on pointing out the endless symmetry between the way his father makes art and the way he approaches his life. The film is already mosaic-esque in its very formation — born of fragments, snapshots, family home movies, interviews, verite, animated drawings, it forms a pointillist whole. A quibble perhaps, but the film only falters when the underlining of the relationship between the film’s form and content (and its content’s form and content, and so on) becomes its own kind of tunnelvision.