Please don't keep me waiting
I can't hold on much longer
Please don't keep me waiting
I can't love you any stronger

The man's face is a mask of quiet resignation, guarding secrets. His eyes blaze with something resembling glory, then slowly well up with a mounting panic. He looks like he's about to cry.

The scene repeats three times in "The Beaver Trilogy" -- one of the oddest films to premiere at this year's Sundance Film Festival. The first singing man, videotaped in 1979, is an unknown performer identified only as Groovin' Gary. Later, Gary is played by Sean Penn in 1981, moments before "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," and then, finally in 1984, by Crispin Glover, before he starred in "Back to the Future."

Together, the portraits in "The Beaver Trilogy" don't tell a traditional story as much as they complete a character study of its star, "Groovin' Gary," aka the Beaver Kid. Spanning history and farce, inhabiting the gray zone where the ridiculous becomes the sublime, director Trent Harris' accidental feature is a delicate hybrid of fiction, cinéma vérité and medical X-ray. The only thing stranger than the film itself is the story of how it got made, and why, 20 years later, a broad audience might actually get to see it.

In 1979, 25-year-old Trent Harris, an assistant cameraman at a Salt Lake City TV station, first encountered the relatively new technology of video. Picking up the station's brand-new video camera for the first time, he wandered out into the parking lot to figure out how it worked. Zooming in on a random figure at the far end of the lot, he adjusted focus as the figure -- drawn to him by the presence of the camera -- approached and struck up a conversation.

The man was Groovin' Gary (his real name has never been released), a recent high school graduate and would-be entertainer. That morning, he'd driven to Salt Lake City from Beaver, Utah, in his '67 Chevy Impala with the hope of interesting the local TV station in a talent show he had organized. His intentions were a little transparent because the show was principally a showcase for his Olivia Newton-John drag act. In the parking lot, Gary offered a sneak preview: He sang, danced, joked, did impersonations -- anything he could think of to hold the camera.

Charmed by his moxie, if not exactly his talent, Harris drove to Beaver several weeks later to film the show. First he met Gary at the local mortuary, where he taped the staff cosmetician applying the transforming makeup necessary for Gary's act. Gary, while carefully brushing out his blond wig or receiving applications of lipstick and mascara, repeatedly explained that he just does the act "for a kick."

"I still enjoy being a man," says the Matthew McConaughey lookalike, doth protesting too much. "I'm a man, not a girl."

He swaggers off backstage like a linebacker in showgirl leathers.

Gary's rendition of Newton-John's "Please Don't Keep Me Waiting" -- sung in a reedy falsetto with an "evening, Guv'nor" fake Cockney accent -- is excruciatingly bad. In front of a largely silent and somewhat mystified audience, the weight of this realization commingles with performance anxiety and possibly some deeper strain of sexual ambiguity or humiliation. He finishes practically in tears.

Gary called Harris a few days later and haltingly requested that the tape not be aired -- as if it was actually a possibility. Some time after that, either out of a sense of impending shame or for reasons more complicated, Gary tried unsuccessfully to shoot himself.

Harris quit the station, packed up his old car and moved to L.A. He enrolled in the American Film Institute with the express purpose of making a short film. He wrote a script and looked for actors to cast as Gary.

The immediate result, shot on video in 1981, was a 30-minute improv exercise called "The Beaver Kid." The short film starred a painfully young Sean Penn in the role of Gary. Penn would shortly play Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," and seemingly incorporate wholesale Gary's signature halting laugh.

"We had all kinds of people read for the part," recalls Harris today, well into his 40s and gracefully turning gray. "Nick Cage, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards. The day that [Penn] came, he hadn't had time to really read the script or anything, so he said, 'Well, I'll just be that character.' We wandered around the city, and he played my cousin from Beaver, Utah. I introduced him to my friends and whatnot, and he just played that character. It was funny because a year later, when he became a big shot, some of my friends came up to me and said, 'Hey, your cousin is really doing well for himself.'"

On the strength of that half-hour videotape, Harris was then able to mount a 30-minute 16mm film in 1984 called "The Orkly Kid," named for his own hometown of Orkly, Idaho. When Sean Penn begged off, citing "girlfriend problems," Harris cast a still relatively unknown Crispin Glover. For the third time now, Harris re-created the original encounter in the parking lot, the rendezvous in the funeral home and the onstage performance, with a brief coda dramatizing Gary's subsequent letters and suicide attempt. (Gary's shy demeanor, nervous laughter and wide-eyed wonder found its way into Glover's Marty McFly character in "Back to the Future," filmed later that year.)

Harris spent the next eight years in Hollywood, where he sold several scripts and managed to direct one feature film in 1992, the cult movie "Rubin and Ed," starring Crispin Glover and Howard Hesseman, a buddy film about a trek into the desert to bury a pet cat. The movie bombed and Harris fled to Salt Lake City.

Back in Utah, he managed to make one more feature, "Plan 10 From Outer Space." Despite the title, the movie is not an Ed Wood sendup, but rather an intermittently comic thriller predicated on Mormon theology. For no easily discernible reason, the movie features a 10-minute interlude with cult actress Karen Black as the angel Nihor, singing a Mormon ode to the planet Kolab in a faux-Wagnerian Yoko Ono falsetto.

Now playing: Read all the recent movie reviews by Salon's critics