"Sometimes when I'm onstage I'll have this eerie disorientation, and for a moment my eyes feel like a surveillance camera," Miranda July once said. The young director began life as a performance artist, creating theater pieces that she labeled "live movies." These were often multimedia events in which July would interact with film and music, something that led many critics to compare her to Laurie Anderson. Though there were certain similarities and shared themes between July and Anderson's work, there was one stark difference: Anderson offered a cool shrug to the world's madness, while July seemed on the verge of a Munchian scream.

Me and You and Everyone We Know will be the first contact that most people will have with July. Although this is her first full-length film, it is braced by years of July's "live movies" and short films (of which The Amateurist and Nest of Tens are worth seeking out). Still, there's a great maturity to Me and You. Even though it re-explores the anomic geography of nowhere that has served as July's terrain, it has a gentleness and hopefulness that is surprising from an artist so well-versed in anxiety and displacement.

In an unnamed and unlandmarked city, a group of lonely characters are each in their own way trying to connect with other people. Performance artist Christine (July) is often lost in her work, with her only social contact coming from passengers in her day job as an "Eldercab" driver. Richard (John Hawkes) is a dreamer stuck selling shoes in a shopping mall. Recently divorced, he takes care of his two sons, Robby (Brandon Ratcliff) and Peter (Miles Thompson), though he's a rather ineffectual, if well-meaning, father. But with Richard off working, the boys are left to their own devices. Peter, 14, becomes sex practice for some local teenage girls, while 7-year-old Robby has stumbled into a serious chatroom romance.

The reclusive performance artist and the distracted shoe salesman will meet, though both seem to lack the language to communicate their attraction to each other, while Peter will befriend a precocious and isolated little neighbor girl, Sylvie (Carlie Westerman). Robby's Internet affair will also lead to a surprising encounter (without divulging its meaning, suffice to say that Robby's chatroom symbol — ))-(( — is now a hot T-shirt graphic in the States).

Me and You and Everyone We Know is a part of the burgeoning American indie film scene that, with any luck, will eventually overwhelm the Hollywood machine, as independent filmmakers did in the '60s and '70s. It has the same invigorating DIY feel of Thumbsucker, Harmony Korine's tough Gummo, Larry Clark's Kids and, especially, Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse.

As was evident in her stage work (which this writer was fortunate enough to follow closely), July has a faultless ear for the oblique poetry and unexamined anxieties that underscore normal speech: "I don't want to have to do this living," Richard says at one point. "I just walk around. I want to be swept off my feet, you know? I want my children to have magical powers. I am prepared for amazing things to happen. I can handle it."

The performances are all very strong. July's own edgy gamine persona always makes her an actress to watch. Hawks' Richard is also a finely drawn portrait of a man scraping by, surviving on his capacity to dream. Since Nest of Tens, July has proven to be skilled at directing child actors, and here pulls excellent performances from Thompson and Ratcliff. One of the finest performers, though, is Westerman, whose worldly-wise little girl is obviously close to July's heart, as the director began her career writing plays at age 9 before she fell, as she once told me, into a dark writer's block at 14.

As a filmmaker, July's "surveillance camera" eyes have become masters for delving into the interiors of her characters' lives. These are all fully fleshed people living in a complete, if often lonely, world.