amuel Curtis (McAbee) nearly crash-lands his interplanetary space locomotive on the asteroid Ceres, site of the Ceres Crossroads, a seedy saloon on the edge of space. He's been hired by persons unknown to transport a cat on the evening of the big dance competition.
An old acquaintance, his former dance partner otherwise known as the Blueberry Pirate (Joshua Taylor), tells Curtis that the cat is part of grander scheme. In exchange for the cat, Curtis has come into possession of the rarest of commodities in the solar system: a cloning device with the beginnings of a Real Live Girl.
The Pirate tells Curtis his plan. Take the Girl to Jupiter, a men-only mining colony whose inhabitants worship a 16-year-old Boy (Cook), the only of their number who has ever seen a woman's breast. Exchange the Girl for the Boy. Transport the Boy to Venus, a women-only planet whose denizens need one young man to satisfy their reproductive needs. Exchange the Boy for the corpse of the last King of Venus, and transport the corpse back to Earth, where his family will pay handsomely.
Curtis agrees. He and Taylor take a break to win the dance contest.
Unbeknownst to Curtis, however, the nefarious Prof. Hess (Sisto) has been listening in. He harbors a mysterious grudge against Curtis. After Curtis leaves, Hess vaporizes the Pirate, takes the cat and gives chase.
What's Hess' problem? As Curtis tries to explain, he wants to kill everyone around Curtis, then forgive Curtis, then kill him, too. But he can't kill anyone he has a problem with, lest that problem remain unresolved. So he has to resolve the problem first, then kill them. "That doesn't make any sense," one character says. "Yes," Curtis replies. "It does."
Will Curtis get the Girl to Jupiter? Will the Boy agree to come to Venus? Will Hess vaporize the cat? And why does Hess keep telling everyone it's his birthday?
Something completely different
The American Astronaut defies categorization, a kind of independent noir science-fiction Western musical art film about sex, rock 'n' roll and Nevada. Shot for what appears to be about $15, the black-and-white movie is so low-rent that it makes use of paintings to depict space travel and cuts to a montage of still images to advance the narrative.
Yet the film contains some striking high-contrast imagery, moments of loopy surreal humor, catchy rock production numbers—all by McAbee and Bobby Lurie's band, the Billy Nayer Show—and a peculiar plot that's literally so out-of-this world that audiences won't know what they're looking at.
American Astronaut is the culmination of McAbee's San-Francisco-based performance act, corralling his interests in music, performance art, acting, animation and filmmaking into one spaced-out enterprise. At times, it has the feel of David Lynch's Eraserhead; at other times, a Westernized Rocky Horror. But mostly, it's its own thing, and most of the time, that isn't bad.
McAbee is like a skid-row Hugh Jackman, and the interior of his spaceship is furnished like, well, a furnished room: peeling wallpaper, antique sconces, a brass bed and a control panel that looks like Flash Gordon's, only older. Unlike the cantina at Mos Eisley, the Ceres Crossroads is populated by outer-space rejects so foul you can practically smell their dirty undershirts—and the stand-up act there would give Charles Manson the creeps.
Jupiter, by contrast, is an abandoned movie theater in Queens, lit like 1984, with ranks of zombified mineworkers attending a spotlit Fuehrer. Their entertainment? A young boy, dressed like an Art Deco Thor, prancing to a mystifying rock song about a woman's breast.
A space station is a barn with a wizened alien. And Venus is a Victorian tea party on the banks of a wintry lake, populated by aging Southern belles fluttering their fans. Characters often break into song to advance the story—most oddly, two middle-aged men marching in a men's room while the hero takes a dump.
