Opens June 23, 2000.

"You've got to give Mom her space" is a representative line of expositional dialogue in Luminous Motion. It's altogether indicative of the kind of tripe-talk gummed together in this pretentious indie, a film that fittingly deserves it's own space - in the trash.

Dopey enough to be praised by the New York Times, this gyrating mini-movie is a meandering blight, a purposeless wander on the most pretentious edges of the indie-scape, basically visiting every independent theme park in its dispersal of drippy, half-baked litter. As empty headed in theme as it is deficient in aesthetic skill, it's also a simple-minded celebration of the criminal life and as callously amoral a theme as you'll ever find, but we'll defer to the grand thinkers of the Gore campaign to chomp on that aspect of the film's bankruptcy.

In this cheap-looking, small-minded romp, a young mother (Deborah Kara Unger) and her 10-year-old son (Eric Lloyd) tool around the countryside in her dilapidated Chevy. Mom's got her hands not only on the wheel but also in the pockets of every trampy roadside Romeo she can pick up and toss. Sonny boy, meanwhile, cadges the small cash and natters on endlessly in the front seat as if he's just cribbed the exam notes for Oprah Winfrey 101 at whatever expensive, liberal arts asylum that's peddling it.

Mom doesn't make much sense because she's continually swilling vodka, but, at least the character has an excuse for her blathering, which is more than you can say for screenwriters Robert Roth and Scott Bradfield who served up the dialogue crock here. Overall, the narrative is a demo-derby of big themes rammed together with low-leaded aesthetic accelerants. The iconography of life-on-the-road, both in its carefree aspects as well as its numbing predictability, is dramatized in the most tediously predictable constructs: Mother and Son get bothered by surly people; unkempt Johns get done by Mom; cruddy motels get trashed; red-lined maps get crumpled…on and on and further down the road to narrative Nowheresville.

Since there is little in the way of character development or backstory, it's never clear what's the reason for the twosome's traveled existence. Although we're clued that Mom has been burdened by an unhappy marriage, it's never sufficiently developed why she's developed a drinking problem and the need to turn tricks under the nose of her 10-year-old son. After a while her dim-eyed, wanton sexual antics become as tedious as they are sickening.

In fact, the whole darn narrative trek would be totally monotonous if it weren't for the jarringly idiotic dialogue, particularly when the ten-year-old tyke spouts physics-as-life blarney. Unfortunately, neither the screenwriters nor the director, Bette Gordon, posit much that couldn't be summed up more succinctly and entertainingly by a Burma Shave road sign. Scene after scene drones on, all about as interesting as the Nebraska countryside: Mom guzzles and nuzzles while Sonny Boy puzzles about the universe and the rationale/dynamic of their floundering existence.

Crammed into the backstory seat of this seedy road/mind trip are a couple of more significant characters, ostensibly folks who represent the missing elements in both Mommy and Sonny's lives. One is a trick, a fair-minded handyman who offers a modicum of stability in their sorry lives, while the other is the boy's emotional vision of his long-lost father, a disgustingly domineering sort. Add to the meandering mess, some not-so-subtle Oedipal pangs in a lot of low-rent locales, and a couple of pseudo-feminist rants about the callousness of men folk. That's about the extent of it in this non-Luminous Motion.