Minnie and Moskowitz is a home movie, in the sense that Cassavetes employed his whole family (his wife, mother, children, his wife's mother and brother)-and that their rollicking love keeps an unlikely film beautifully afloat. This is an homage to the wackiest screwball comedies of Cassavetes' youth-the films of Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks, with their moments of insight and black hilarity that stop us in our tracks. Gena Rowlands is a lovely-to-look-at museum employee who gives her all to the fantasies of a darkened cinema for little or no return ("I've never had a Charles Boyer in my life," she admits). Married creeps like the one played here by Cassavetes she's had plenty of, however. When Seymour Cassel-an aging hippie in New York who needs a change and so becomes an aging hippie in L.A.-storms into her heart, she knows "there's some sort of craziness going on here that's not right." The mis-match of the century is perfect material for Cassavetes; he rolls up his directorial sleeves and makes it work. What most critics call Cassavetes' most accessible film may be every bit as challenging as the others, just funnier. In fact the screwball mode fits the Cassavetes mode, as Ray Carney describes it, rather well: "Every time a tone is about to stabilize, he upsets it; every time a relationship is about to stall into a fixed position, he pulls the rug out from under it (and us)...It is almost as if Cassavetes' films were a kind of 'action painting' in celluloid." In two memorable cameos, Tim Carey spouts the poetry of the anti-cinema, and Katherine Cassavetes (the director's mother, playing Seymour's mother) devastatingly delivers what we hope is not a self-portrait.