The American Astronaut

Every once in a blue moon some inexplicable force of cinema pushes all sanity and sense of aesthetics aside and leaves me defenselessly embracing a movie that has no apparent redeeming factor other than its dubious eccentricity. This black-and-white, micro-budget space adventure is such a production. This shameless candidate for immediate Midnight Movie canonization is a science-fiction musical in which galactic cowboy traveler-trader-bar hopper Sam Curtis transports such oddball cargo as the Boy Who Has Seen a Woman’s Breast from planet to planet. Would it help if I mentioned this celebration of corn and cheese includes one of the most bizarre, exhilarating rockabilly dance numbers ever committed to celluloid? I thought not. Written and directed by Cory McAbee with music by his Bay Area art-pop group, the Billy Nayer Show.