Keaton’s Sure Hand Guides ‘Heroes’ : Movie review: The actress-turned-director demonstrates empathy toward all sorts of human behavior in her first big-screen feature film.

“A hero,” Selma Lidz tells her son Steven, “is anyone who finds his own way through this life.” Only 12, Steven is on the verge of discovering how difficult that task can be. And how much help he can get from an unlooked-for source, his two fiercely eccentric uncles, the “Unstrung Heroes” of this lovely film’s title.

Written by Richard LaGravenese and based on an autobiographical novel by Franz Lidz, “Unstrung Heroes” is a pivotal moment as well in the directing career of Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton. Though she has directed TV movies, music videos and feature documentaries, this is Keaton’s first drama for the large screen, and how much she and her team have accomplished is as impressive as how casually they seem to have done it.

For “Unstrung Heroes,” while easy to absorb, is surprisingly rich in the feelings it conveys. It is at once a story of adolescent self-discovery in the face of terrible family crisis, a love note to motherhood and a passionate tribute to idiosyncratic behavior. And in its unexpected ability to mix slapstick with subtlety, sadness with mad farce, it touches an unusual and especially emotional chord.

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, “Heroes” seems at first to be focusing on Steven’s father, Sid Lidz (sharply played by John Turturro). An oddball inventor whose not-ready-for-prime-time projects include a “perpetual-motion baby-jumper” and a “mild-monsoon sprinkler system,” Sid talks as fast as a rocket, oblivious to the thoughts of his 12-year-old son (Nathan Watt) and the boy’s younger sister, Sandy (Kendra Krull).

“Is Dad from another planet?” a troubled Steven asks his mother, who smiles with the reassuring knowledge that his father is just a bit different. As Selma Lidz, the warm, caring, human element in the Lidz equation, Andie MacDowell simply blossoms, giving an appealing and natural performance, one of her best ever, as the family’s unflappable anchor.

Suddenly, that anchor threatens to give way. Selma collapses on the floor, stricken with an obviously serious but unnamed illness that both puzzles and frightens everyone, especially the children, who are told little about it. Sid, frantic for his own reasons and pleading Selma’s need for rest, unthinkingly shuts their mother out of Steven’s and Sandy’s lives. Almost wild with the need for comfort of any kind, Steven takes off one night to visit his father’s two brothers in their strange apartment in a run-down residence hotel.

Up to this point, the uncles have been shadowy figures to Steven, known largely through his father’s scorn of them as cautionary examples of “what can happen to an undisciplined mind.” Now, turning to them in desperation, he discovers a kinship with and a connection to their childlike comic idiosyncrasies.

Uncle Danny is the more assertive of the two, which is a polite way of saying he is a raging paranoid conspiracy theorist who thinks his pancakes might be bugged and is convinced “Idaho means Jew-hater in Cherokee.”

“Seinfeld’s” Michael Richards plays Danny with a daring, full-throttle brio, managing to make his character sympathetic as well as manic.

To say Uncle Arthur, exquisitely played by veteran actor Maury Chaykin, is a collector does not hint at the scope of his ambition. Operating on the assumption that “people throw out a lot of things that are good,” Arthur has made it his life’s work to save all of them. And the brothers’ apartment, jammed floor to ceiling with newspapers, rubber balls, wedding cake decorations and everything in between (all collected over a period of months by set decorator Larry Dias), is as vivid a presence as any of the film’s actors.

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Though “Unstrung Heroes’ ” thematic elements are uniformly strong, it is the film’s treatment of Danny and Arthur that is especially impressive. The uncles are neither condescended to nor treated with gooey reverence, the way eccentrics usually are on film, but embraced, loved and respected as straight-ahead human beings.

Which, as Selma’s illness worsens and Steven is allowed to spend the summer with the brothers, is how they treat their nephew. Positive that “our Steven has a rare gift,” convincing him “you’re the one to watch” and even deciding to change his name to the less ordinary Franz, they see possibilities in the young man neither his parents or even Steven himself imagined.

It was Diane Keaton’s job to ride herd over this engaging menagerie, and she has done it with the kind of gentle but sure empathy toward all sorts of human behavior that has made all the difference. Moving in a way we are not accustomed to, “Unstrung Heroes” demonstrates that even the saddest stories can be wistful and joyous if the right people are involved in the telling.

* MPAA rating: PG, emotional subject matter. Times guidelines: deals with serious illness to a parent.

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‘Unstrung Heroes’

Andie MacDowell: Selma Lidz

John Turturro: Sid Lidz

Michael Richards: Danny Lidz

Maury Chaykin: Arthur Lidz

Nathan Watt: Steven/Franz Lidz

A Roth/Arnold production, released by Hollywood Pictures. Director Diane Keaton. Producers Susan Arnold & Donna Roth, Bill Badalato. Screenplay Richard LaGravenese, based on the book by Franz Lidz. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael. Editor Lisa Churgin. Costumes Jill Ohanneson. Music Thomas Newman. Production design Garreth Stover. Art director Chris Cornwell. Set decorator Larry Dias. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

* In limited release.