Ups and Downs of a Contradictory, Writerly Life

“Bird by Bird With Annie,” the latest documentary from Academy Award-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock (“Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision”) is an engaging profile of author and writing instructor Anne Lamott, a feminist/born-again Christian/recovering alcoholic/single mother--in other words, a complicated life aptly reflected in this film.

The film gets its title from Lamott’s 1994 book “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” an irreverent and frequently hilarious but also illuminating guide for writers, both seasoned and not.

The book is as much an autobiographical work as it is a how-to book for writers, and it is this thread that Mock follows in her film.

Lamott describes how as a child she first turned to humor, and later alcohol (at age 13), to deal with the daily taunting by neighborhood kids and schoolmates who teased her for her ungainly looks.

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Lamott, now a pixieish woman with blond mini-dreadlocks, was a gangly kid with a towhead afro.

Lamott estimates that between the ages of 19 and 32 she was “getting very drunk on a nightly basis” before she finally realized that if she didn’t get sober, she might very well die.

Around the same time, Lamott found herself drawn to a small Presbyterian church near her home in the houseboat community of Sausalito near San Francisco.

She recalls loving the gospel music and hymns but always checking out “before the Jesus stuff started up,” until she had a religious conversion experience.

An unlikely born-again Christian (she playfully describes herself as a “Jesus bon vivant”) Lamott is a woman of contradictions. She acts as an emissary for her church and leads weekend services at a retirement-convalescent home, but she also officiates at the (not legally binding) wedding ceremony for two gay male friends.

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Mock smartly lets Lamott tell her own story and makes optimum use of the scenic community where Lamott lives with her young son Sam and her aging mother.

The only complaint: Lamott is such a complex and interesting subject, Mock might have considered making a film at least twice as long as its 40-minute running time.

Also playing with “Bird by Bird” is Terry Sanders’ excellent 40-minute “Never Give Up: The 20th Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper” (which was reviewed for The Times on April 22, 1997 by Daniel Cariaga) and Mock and Sanders’ daughter Jessica Sanders’ “Los Angeles,” a sweet but slight 12-minute, black-and-white short fiction film shot in Santa Monica and Venice beaches.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: A few expletives; appropriate for anyone old enough to read Lamott’s books.

‘Bird by Bird With Annie’

Ocean Releasing presents a Sanders & Mock/American Film Foundation Production. Written, directed and produced by Freida Lee Mock. Cinematographers Eric Daarstad, Jon Else, Bob Elfstrom, Terry Sanders. Editor Anne Stein. Music Isaiah Sanders. Production associate Brittany Sanders. Running time: 40 minutes.

Exclusively at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.