Jason Bateman and Nicole Kidman in The Family Fang (Starz Digital)

One of the most compellingly inventive films in a while, The Family Fang is Jason Bateman’s sophomore directorial effort and a welcome reminder of how good an actress Nicole Kidman can be. While it focuses on fairly familiar themes of family dysfunction, abuse, coping, and the salvific power of art, its plot and structure are creative and fresh, giving off the unmistakable feeling of having something to say. Its story works on a variety of levels and is fearless about pursuing some of its darker themes to the fullest.

Bateman plays Baxter Fang, a novelist of considerable fame and renown (apparently this is set in an alternate universe), and Kidman plays his older sister Annie, an actress who has made a string of unremarkable movies and struggles to stay out of the tabloids for erratic behavior. Baxter, struggling mightily with writer’s block, is trapped in an adolescence that is extending well into middle age—an early, character-establishing scene shows him firing off cannon-like potato guns with his yokel friends while guzzling beer and courting inevitable injury. Annie is making waves for going topless for the first time in her career and sleeping with journalists.

Their parents, the performance artists Caleb (Christopher Walken) and Camille (Maryann Plunkett) Fang, have had an outsized impact on their children’s lives. They were pioneering avant-garde artists in the seventies, specializing in real-world happenings meant to blur the line between art and life. Whoever happened to be in the public space where the art-event was staged became part of the piece. Caleb and Camille put Baxter and Annie front and center in these art pranks, without much thought given to their long-term psychological well-being. (The film’s central plot device is a surprisingly intriguing murder mystery, about which the less revealed, the better.)

The film opens with the best of Fangs’ “pieces,” in which they used their doe-eyed children to put people off their guard, drawing them into the performance/prank more easily. Though an enthusiastic collaborator in all of the happenings, Camille quietly resents Caleb for so coldly manipulating his children for his art, valuing them only as a means of pushing the artistic envelope. This has clearly messed his children up, and Camille has been stewing with moral compunctions for years, but she has stood by him because she believes in his vision.

Overall, it is Kidman’s movie, as she is the only consistent presence throughout, with her parents popping in and out periodically, much as the unsteady presences they have been in her life. It is a testament to her ability to carry a movie forward that The Family Fang is as watchable as it is, since not a ton happens plot-wise, and there aren’t any traditionally showy award-bait moments. Bateman appears in nearly as many frames as Kidman, but he is more subdued and reactive.

Walken hasn’t been given a role this good in quite some time, and he tears into it for all it’s worth, despite appearing in only a handful of scenes. The 1970s performance art pieces pop up sporadically in video clips, with Jason Butler Harner playing the younger Caleb and the dynamic Kathryn Hahn playing the younger Camille.

One of the more thought-provoking, though underexplored, themes is Caleb’s growing frustration with the conditions for practicing his brand of art in the contemporary, smartphone-addled world. When he tries to pull off a somewhat half-baked performance piece at a chicken sandwich stand, he realizes that people have become too submissive and spineless to properly reactive. His performance art requires people to have common sense and react in reasonable ways, but nowadays people are willing to accept almost any absurdity as a reasonable state of affairs. Reality has gotten too weird, fractured, and unreal to be fodder for absurdist experimental art anymore.

Easily one of the most fascinating examinations of the role of avant-garde art in a world that has largely moved on from it, as well as the competing interests of art and that pesky little thing called life, The Family Fang rises above standard family dysfunction fare.