'Prodigal Sons' compellingly captures a tale of 2 siblings

Leaping from Helena, Mont., to Split, Croatia — by way of Old Hollywood — Kimberly Reed's compelling documentary memoir, "Prodigal Sons," is filled with revelations.

Some of these are emotional, as when the filmmaker returns home to Helena after a 20-year absence to find that her high-school friends treat her no differently from when she was a handsome jock named Paul McKerrow.

Others are circumstantial, like the bombshell that reveals her adopted brother, Marc, as a blood relative to Hollywood royalty.

At the film's core, however, is the loving but long-combative relationship between Marc and Reed, a connection that ties both to a past that neither recalls with fondness.

Seriously brain-damaged in a car accident, Marc suffers from seizures and terrifying mood swings (in one particularly painful scene, he brutally attacks the sexual choices of his sister and their gay brother, Todd), but Reed and her cinematographer, John Keitel, never sensationalize. Maintaining a simple, naturalistic style, they patiently capture the shifting dynamics of a family hanging in without giving out.

A tale of two siblings — one basking in memories, the other fleeing them — "Prodigal Sons" grapples with identity through the prism of sibling rivalry.

In the end its conclusions have little to do with gender and everything to do with acceptance.