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Exclusive: Francis Ford Coppola has boarded Brother Verses Brother as executive producer. The Ari Gold-directed drama has its world premiere today at SXSW.

Inspired by Coppola’s concept of Live Cinema, Gold embarked on a radically personal musical odyssey alongside real-life twin, Ethan Gold. As their characters search for their father across the great and troubled city of San Francisco, they paint a vision of Bohemian culture, blending cinema with reality to create a dream of the comedy and pathos of modern America. The actors around them, all playing fictionalized versions of themselves, engage in improv as the narrative feature follows combative and co-dependent twin musicians as they hunt for their dying poet father in and around San Francisco.

“When I read Francis Ford Coppola’s book Live Cinema and Its Techniques, one paragraph struck me like a thunderbolt: ‘I have always loved when art works are what they are about.

Many of the shots that open American Gigolo are angled far above high-price escort Julian Kay (Richard Gere) as he goes about his date. The bird’s-eye view on him captures the materialistic glamor in which he walks—designer clothes, a Mercedes convertible—while also placing it at enough of a distance to remove any identification or pleasure on our part. All at once, Julian is defined both as a man who delights in consumer culture while being a product himself, a person who’s constantly using himself as a model for the very things he buys.

Writer-director Paul Schrader routinely emphasizes this detachment in further sketching out the details of Julian’s life and demeanor. The man lives in a spacious apartment with modern decor, but the ample negative space of the flat stresses how it feels less like a home and more like a showroom for a lifestyle.