Paradox

It’s fine if Hannah and her ragtag team just set out to make something fun. But it feels better-suited for playing on a reel-to-reel projector in someone’s basement than at the biggest film venue of SXSW.

Paradox is choppy and directionless, better seen as an experimental concert film that attempted to do something more ambitious than the average music video.

Then again, even they may find that this collection of half-baked scenes, inscrutable imagery and, yes, a couple of splendid musical performances wears out its welcome long before its conclusion.

Paradox, a waste of time made bearable only by its brevity, plays like a bad acid flashback from the 1970s, a time when similarly self-conscious trippy pastiches of rock music and genre conventions proliferated on the midnight-movie circuit.

Paradox is sort of a cinematic flip book companion piece to Young’s “Paradox” album. And it’s mess, son.