Our daily life, unlike fiction, has no beginning, middle or end. Few directors would have the nerve to try to film that fact. Andrew Bujalski is one of those few—he’s staked out his own small territory in two 16-mm films that feature a dryly humorous, fly-on-the wall view of 20-something thought and behavior.

His latest one is called Mutual Appreciation. In scenes that follow and balance one another while maintaining a sense of formlessness, we follow Alan (Justin Rice), an amiable young musician and songwriter who has traveled to Brooklyn from Boston to try to make a living playing small rock clubs. (His phone conversations with his father, who quietly insists on him finding a real job, are dead on.) His best friend Lawrence (played by Bujalski himself) is a teaching assistant whose girlfriend Ellie (Rachel Clift) can’t help but flirt a little with Alan. Things happen, kind of: Lawrence is asked to be part of an all-male reading of women’s oral histories, Alan reluctantly hooks up with a local female DJ, which leads to him asking her brother to play drums for him. After a poorly-attended concert, he ends up at a party where he calls his ex-girlfriend, ditches his current one, gets drunk, and then goes to another party where some young women wearing wigs try to get him to put on a dress. All this is a prelude to a triangle with his best friend’s partner. But not really.

You may assume that the story is not the point. Bujalski’s previous film was called Funny Ha-Ha, because that’s just the kind of comedy it wasn’t. The same is true here. The young, self-conscious characters talk around their feelings, constantly hesitating, inhabiting a moment that feels completely present, partly due to the seemingly improvised dialogue, but mostly because of Bujalski’s extremely relaxed aesthetic.

Most movies present reality through color, sets, make-up, good-looking actors, and multimillion dollar budgets. Taking all that away doesn’t guarantee that you don’t have a turkey, but Bujalski is a director in tune with his limited means. The black and white photography and absence of a musical score seem inevitable. The characters look, act, and talk like real people, and the dialogue especially—funny, evasive, sometimes quite annoying—is presented in as unemphatic a way as possible. The effect, if you’re used to the way movies usually depict things, is almost bizarre. This is precisely the point, if you must have one. The film takes the complete uncertainty of real life and sticks it right in your face. Through a kind of artistic subtraction, Mutual Appreciation leaves us alone with the humor, and the discomfort, of our self-regard.

Since 1968, the major American film studios have practiced a form of self-censorship supposedly designed to prevent the industry from assault by the government or outside groups. The Motion Picture Association of America assigns ratings to each film: G, PG, R, and NC-17 (which used to be X), based on the judgments of a group of parents charged with preventing children from seeing something they shouldn’t. Headed by former LBJ crony Jack Valenti, the organization is remarkable for keeping its meetings and the names of its judges a complete secret.

With satiric zeal, director and native Tucsonan Kirby Dick attacks this questionable institution in his latest movie, appropriately titled This Film Is Not Yet Rated. First with a combination of interviews and clips, he presents the facts. For a filmmaker to get an NC-17 instead of an R is in effect to doom his or her film to failure, since most theaters will steer clear of a film with this rating. Thus directors are forced to take material out of their films because of the opinions of persons whose identities are secret. Furthermore, these evaluators often refuse to give details on what exactly is offensive, so the filmmaker is left groping in the dark trying to figure out what to cut.

And what do these mystery judges find so offensive? Sex usually, violence almost never. The sexual desires of women and gays are apparently quite frightening, while straight male desire and abusive treatment of women is ok. Kimberly Peirce, who directed Boys Don’t Cry, tells how her movie was threatened with an NC-17 because a female orgasm went on too long. How long is too long, you may wonder. But no answer is forthcoming.

The film’s cleverest idea is to have Dick hire a private detective to figure out who the secret judges are, with some interesting results. Then he turns around and submits his film-in-progress, the one we’re watching, to the MPAA for a rating, which promptly gives it an NC-17. This leads to a hilarious tug-of-war in which the director goes to a secret appeals board and proceeds to ask them their names. There are even two clergymen who have been officially installed there as “observers.”