DYSFUNCTIONING JUST FINE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Amid all the prim prattle about family values--a term definable only as a vague expression of nostalgia for a past that never was--the Lidz clan, dysfunctioning in Los Angeles in the 1960s, reminds us that the American home has been, often as not, a nuthouse. And that early, massive exposure to eccentricity can be the best possible preparation for the life that follows: what does not make us completely crazy makes us strong. Or at least tolerant and flexible, qualities that are largely absent from our book of virtues these days.

This lesson comes hard to 12-year-old Steven Lidz (Nathan Watt). His mother Selma (Andie MacDowell) is dying slowly, bravely, of cancer, and his father Sid (John Turturro) cannot offer him much consolation. In the best of times, Sid is a tense and cranky figure, obsessively working on impractical inventions. In these, the worst of times, he is mostly preoccupied with cursing God, fate and Selma's doctors. The kid badly needs a dose of chicken soup and diversion.

Which is where Sid's brothers--the Unstrung Heroes of this movie's title--come in. They live behind multilocked doors, surrounded by tons of old newspapers, in a downtown slum. Danny (Michael Richards of Seinfeld) is a wild-eyed, left-wing paranoid, certain that every knock on the door heralds the arrival of the FBI; Arthur (Maury Chaykin) is a soft-spoken collector of wedding-cake figures, snow domes and rubber balls that he teaches Steven to listen to, convinced the voices of the children who once bounced them still echo faintly inside.

Living on the margins of life and sanity, they have time for family history and sentiment, for religious tradition and, yes, for lost little boys. They think a better name for Steven would be Franz Lidz, resonant as it is with romantic and artistic striving. They think a Bar Mitzvah is essential to his spiritual growth. And you never can tell when lessons in evading government functionaries (like a building inspector) will come in handy. Somehow they get Steven safely through his first encounters with mortality and onrushing manhood.

And somehow Diane Keaton, directing her first fictional feature, gets us safely through a movie that could have turned to mush at any moment. She knows how to touch on an emotion without squeezing every last tear out of it. She knows how to get a laugh without bringing down the whole fragile edifice of her film. She is helped a lot by a terrific cast, which understands that playing madness is very serious business, and by Richard LaGravenese's wonderfully modulated script. From The Fisher King through A Little Princess and The Bridges of Madison County, he has demonstrated a gift for conveying honest sentiment without permitting us to wallow in it, and he's at his craftsmanlike best here. The flaky charms of Unstrung Heroes will be lost on some hardened souls, and it does have its self-conscious, even slightly self-congratulatory moments. But don't listen to their braying. Listen instead for the minor-key melody of a very seductive movie.