Since the heroine in Andrew Bujalski's first film, Funny Ha Ha, Kate Dollenmayer, is perhaps my favorite female performer of this still-nervous decade, it's not surprising that I have taken like catnip to the father of the Mumblecore film movement's latest female dynamic duo, twin sisters Tilly and Maggie Hatcher, who play Austin, Texas-residing twin sisters Jeannie and Lauren in Bujalski's third feature, Beeswax.

The peculiar, at times downright bizarre appeal of this film to me, the queerest of souls, is that Bujalski has somehow, without consciously trying to, transcended all the annoying barriers between folks queer and straight, young and old, East Coast, Gulf Coast, and Left Coast.

In Funny Ha Ha, Dollenmayer's Marnie is a confused, guy-crazy individual who sets out to claim her adult personhood in virtually the same, totally weird way I once sought mine. An Andrew Bujalski film is a far less embarrassing way to stay forever young than the Bob Dylan-fronted Pepsi commercial from which I just this minute copped that risible slogan.

In Beeswax, Jeanine (Tilly Hatcher) is simultaneously thrilled and embarrassed to find herself in bed with her ex, Merrill (Alex Karpovsky), the wannabe lawyer still shy of passing his Texas Bar exam who has volunteered to help Jeanine fend off a possible lawsuit from Amanda (Anne Dodge), her partner in an Austin vintage clothing store. The legal aid that Merrill may or may not be able to offer Jeanine doesn't begin to justify why he's in her bed, while twin sister Lauren (Maggie Hatcher) is out breaking up with her present male squeeze. The next morning, Jeanine and Merrill confront the odd taboos their night of shagging may have violated.

"So I don't have to do the walk of shame?"

"It's not shame. I feel fine about it."

"I feel great about it, I really do. I thought last night was awesome."

"When I went in there and she wasn't there, I got really excited, and it made me realize that we shouldn't do it again, that's all."

"And go back to radio silence?"

"Maybe we could find some middle ground between radio silence and hot sex."

"Was that what that was? Was that hot sex?"

"I don't know."

"I thought it was hot sex."

"At least–"

"At least one of us did."

"No, it was scorching."

"You're just saying that."

"I was going for a different word."

I've quoted this big hunk of morning-after-awkward-sex patter to demonstrate the jittery lack of specificity in Jeanine and Merrill's flight from commitment, and the underlying truth that the film is hurdling towards: that messy, expanded sense of family that many queer folks are groping for.

Later, Jeanine has an awkward conversation with a new shopclerk hired by her now-estranged partner Amanda. The young woman wants to leave some marriage equality fliers in the store, and attend a pro-gay marriage rally. The scene, a classic Bujalski moment where it's not at all clear what just happened, leaves us wondering why Jeanine is giving the woman such a hard time, and why the same young clerk has an emotional breakdown later in the film, while staffing the register.

Bujalski never presumes to tell us what we should think about any of the shenanigans breaking out between characters with wildly suspect and yet delightfully human motives. It's as if he has embraced that old adage taught to me by my dear old mom: "It's none of your beeswax!"

My One and Only This odd little bio-pic, loosely adapted by Merv Griffin's company and based on the life of the perpetually tanned 60s film star George Hamilton, is rather frustrating to watch. It seems at any moment like it's about to find its stride and tell an engaging, offbeat story of how a boy with acting genes joined his footloose mom and gay older brother on a bumpy ride across 1953 America.

I confess my interest in this one was principally spiked by the young actors taking on a fairly unique challenge for a mainstream American film: a straight/gay brother act. Logan Lerman plays the younger straight bro as a mix of earnest coming-of-age and as a character who finds himself increasing charged with keeping his mom out of trouble, literally out of jail. Lerman, who sparkled as the younger son to Christian Bale's farmer-turned-bounty-hunter in the superb remake of 3:10 to Yuma, is smooth as silk in the mixed role of co-lead and film narrator.   

It falls to young Canadian Mark Rendall – outstanding in the recent Jewish Film Festival's coming-of-age dramedy Victoria Day – to give us a non-cringeworthy, early-50s gay boy. To his credit, Rendall takes his underwritten role (at times he's forced to sit off to the side of the action, fiddling with his hair) and makes you wish that the film's creators had given him a dramatic arc. His big moment comes when he gets to pull a gun on a particularly obnoxious hitchhiker, one of a series of truly bad male choices made by his clueless mom.

Renee Zellweger never quite comes into focus as a mom whose decision to leave her philandering bandleader hubby (a role Kevin Bacon basically phones in) seems maddeningly arbitrary and unmotivated.

In the end, director Richard Loncraine (with writer Charlie Peters) gives us a mildly entertaining if meandering journey through an America that had not yet sprouted freeways, and was just beginning to wrap its collective head around what life could offer a woman with a little mileage on her and two decidedly frisky boys. The one area where this movie doesn't fail is in its view of 50s white American men as a collection of boobs, chauvinists, misfits and worse.

You might choose to skip My One and Only in favor of renting Leonardo DiCaprio's incendiary debut as a young boy running away with his mom to a place called Concrete, Washington. This Boy's Life is the fully realized coming-of-age story of the American writer Tobias Wolfe, complete with a more challenging straight/gay boy subplot.