EDGE San Francisco

The final week of SF IndieFest offers an intelligently bleak eye on same-sex love gone awry. Without, a simultaneously heartbreaking and subversively funny meditation on a queer teen coming apart emotionally after the death of a lover, begins with a tight close-up on an almost perfectly androgynous face. It takes a beat to grasp that we’re watching a young woman, whose internal weather is bleaker than the costal fog seen from the deck of a Washington State ferry boat carrying her to the job from hell.

Joslyn could be the lead singer for one of those terribly hip Northwest indie bands, but she isn’t. Instead the girl is headed for a secluded part of Whidbey Island, where for the next week she’ll be tending to the survival of a catatonic, wheelchair-bound senior, Joe, whose family unit, wrapped too tight, provides their new housegirl with a list hubby Bob dubs the Bible. When’s she’s not feeding or changing him, Joslyn is to keep Joe’s chair parked in front of a high-tech satellite TV system.

"So don’t ever press this button: press this and it shuts the whole system down, and it takes about 15 minutes to reboot. You’ve got about 600 channels, but I just leave it on the fishing channel, that’s 354, that’s the one he likes to watch."

"Do you have Internet here?"

"We don’t - we’re kind of roughing it out here."

The wife picks up the tutorial with orders not to put the knives in the dishwasher, and the disposition of intoxicating beverages.

"Liquor cabinet - how old are you?"

"19."

"Well, it’s okay if you have a little bit of Kahlua, but don’t touch the whiskey, that’s Bob’s and he will notice, I promise you."

Joslyn’s attempts to lose herself in the dreary and humiliating routines that keep Joe in front of the Fishing Channel take their toll. The Groundhog Day-like wake-up jingle from her cell phone and the hamster-wheel monotonous treadmill exercises give way to sad late-night reveries as she watches a digital loop of dead girlfriend videos.

Mark Jackson’s psychologically acute script walks us through an unconventional, emotionally naked checklist for a character simultaneously guilt-ridden and drowning in grief, yet oddly still caught up in the limerence of young love. Naked bouts in front of the mirror give way to desperate attempts to provoke a human reaction from another living soul, even from the all-but-comatose Joe.

Uncovering a yellowing scrapbook, Joslyn lies down next to the old man, making insinuating comments about his childhood keepsakes and possible long-lost love. Eventually Joslyn invites the annoying airport van driver over for a glass of Kahlua and maybe a sip of Bob’s whiskey.

There’s nothing quite like a mumblecore exploration of emotionally frozen white folks from the soggy Northwest to remind us just how much we’ve come to depend on our digital toys. Actress Joslyn Jensen has a nifty range from perk and helpful to menacingly narcissistic and possibly beyond. Depending on your point of view and how bitter you like your dark comedy, Without can be enjoyed as anything from a lesbian Spanking the Monkey to a young male auteur’s dip into Kelly Reichardt territory. Either way, it’s a darkly funny emotional roller coaster to mark the arrival of same-sex marriage in Washington State. (Roxie, 2/19, 9:30 p.m.; 2/20, 7:15 p.m.)

Straight Out of Hunters Point 2 A decade back I hailed Kevin Epps as "a hip-hop Fellini" for creating an astonishingly vivid if scary portrait of the "rude boys" from his hood. As I noted about the original Straight Out of Hunters Point, "A member of the rapper generation whose small startup record labels are the only alternative to the drug economy, Epps’ doggedly handheld camera roller skates through a dead zone of liquor stores and small churches patrolled by a tiny armada of police squad cars, the only representation of the City and County of San Francisco for hundreds of jiving, rhyming teens who could as well be living in Dallas, Birmingham or Kabul."

Ten years later - the mayoralty of Willie Brown having given way to Gavin Newsom and now Ed Lee - little has improved for the folks in the city’s Southern Hills. The Giants are gone, the 49ers are about to follow, bullet-riddled housing projects are yielding to talk of toxic cleanup and promises of "redevelopment," which depending on your point of view are seen as government-sponsored "ethnic cleansing" or the seeds of community renewal.

Epps gives every mouth in the hood a chance to vent: a volcanic rush of the n-word gives way to sober despair. The murder rate’s through the roof, assault weapons are flooding in, and the cops glide through mean streets. (Roxie, 2/24 through 3/1, nightly at 7 & 8:45 p.m.; matinees Sat. & Sun. at 3:15 & 5 p.m. Filmmaker Epps will be there in person for Fri. & Sat. evening shows.)