When Life Throws Those Curveballs

IN the wake of his frankly autobiographical new film, "Beginners," the writer and director Mike Mills has found himself frequently encountering the kindness — and the curiosity — of strangers. “It’s a very sweet and often problematic situation where people feel like they know me and they’re concerned for me,” he said by phone from Los Angeles recently. “It creates these strange little intimate moments.”

“Beginners,” which opens Friday, is the story of two fresh starts. At the age of 75 the newly widowed Hal (Christopher Plummer) comes out as a gay man and leads an active life fully embracing his new identity, before dying of cancer five years later. After Hal’s death his son, Oliver (Ewan McGregor), mourns his father and keeps his example in mind while negotiating his own romantic anxieties.

The film draws on Mr. Mills’s relationship with his father, which changed dramatically after the older man came out. “My gay dad was way more engaged, talking to me about my love life, confronting me about little rackets I was running with myself,” he said. “He was way more open about his desires and ups and downs. We had all these conversations that we never had when he was straight and then — oops — he’s gone.”

Mr. Mills (not to be confused with the R.E.M. bassist) saw “Beginners” as a way both to continue these conversations and to come to grips with what he called “a founding paradox of my life,” his parents’ decision to get married, even though they both knew the elder Mr. Mills was gay. At the same time, he added, “I could hear my dad’s voice saying, ‘Don’t just make this for yourself.’ ”

He recalled his father, Paul, talking one night about living through the Depression and World War II and describing the conservative climate of postwar America. In a line that made its way into “Beginners,” he told his son, “Your mother took off her Jewish badge, and I took off my gay badge, and we got married.”