'Be Kind Rewind' takes clever path rather than copying formulas for zany comedies

In other hands, this scruffy little comedy about a pair of video store clerks who shoot their own digest versions of Hollywood hits would be just another crazy skit-comedy. Director Michel Gondry ("Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind") turns their fan filmmaking into a kind of communal folk art spin on industrialized moviemaking and an affectionate tribute to our relationship to the movies of our lives.

Jack Black revs down his manic energy to play Jerry, the neighborhood eccentric in a Passaic, N.J., neighborhood full of eccentrics. Thanks to his cartoonish battle with the local power station, he inadvertently demagnetizes all the videotapes in what must be the last surviving all-VHS rental store in the United States.

Jerry's otherwise laid-back buddy Mike (Mos Def) decides they'll shoot their own version of "Ghostbusters" (in an afternoon) and hope their only regular customer (Mia Farrow) doesn't notice. It becomes the analog equivalent of a viral video. Soon they're local stars of a backroom mini-studio and the neighborhood that serves as their stock company and their audience.

These aren't late-night comedy sketch-style spoofs but home-movies cobbled together with junkyard props, thrift-store costumes and a second-hand home video camera, directed by adults with the spirit of imaginative kids.

Gondry shows a real affection for their zero-budget videos (which could be an amateur version of Gondry's own aesthetic) and the unabashed joy that the neighborhood gets out of their participation in community-based filmmaking is marvelous. It only feels forced when Gondry leaves his zig-zaggy storytelling for a staged Hollywood ending. It's sweet but contrived.

The rest of the oddball comedy is affably goofy and warmly personable. It's as if Gondry lets his performers settle into their parts and feel their way through their stories.

It gives the film an ambling pace and a unique chemistry that bubbles with strange and unexpected flavors.