Running with Scissors exemplifies in so many ways the axiomatic phrase, "Truth is stranger than fiction". The film is based on the personal memoirs of Augusten Burroughs, who in the DVD special feature piece "A Personal Memoir by Augusten Burroughs" appears to be a fairly normal and well-adjusted person. By all accounts, he should be absolutely and thoroughly psychotic. If Running with Scissors did not consist of the memories of a living, breathing human being, it would be another twisted, annoying film that stretches the capacity of any ordinary viewer to suspend disbelief. But Augusten Burroughs did really have drug-addled, bipolar Deirdre Burroughs for a mother; and she did really leave him at the tender age of fifteen to the guardianship of a malpracticing lunatic psychiatrist named Dr. Finch. Everything about Burroughs' memoir is honest and unflinching, and it resists facile sympathy. Under the tutelage of director Ryan Murphy (creator of Nip/Tuck), this film about Burroughs' childhood retains that aching, funny honesty with grace and pride. A number of reviewers have pegged Running with Scissors as a comedy, and indeed it is. But to call this film a comedy only is to miss its strongest point: that somewhere between tragedy and comedy there is life. The story that keeps you off balance between hilarity and devastation is the one that is telling you something resembling the truth.

Burroughs' story, set in the 70s, traverses a harrowing and jolting road; Joseph Cross (Strangers with Candy, Flags of Our Fathers) plays him in the film to a sweet and unsentimental perfection. Cross' young, slightly pinched face registers all Burroughs' stupefaction at such things as the Finch house - a bright pink, two-story with columns and compulsively arranged junk in the front yard and a kitchen the counters of which have not been cleared for at least 35 years. Dr. Finch gathers all of his "family" - the kids appear to be rejects from the psych ward and not his biological children - around the toilet to wax profound about how the upturned end of his feces portends a change in their fortune; at this Cross not only looks shocked and disgusted. Cross seems to understand that for Burroughs, all of this insanity was above all else a profound disappointment and he plays to that very human - and sane - reaction beautifully.

But for Annette Bening (American Beauty, Bugsy, the woman who has managed to stay with Warren Beatty all these years), Deirdre Burroughs would have been reduced to pure evil. Bening's Golden Globe nominated performance animates Deirdre honestly and compassionately. Bening is beautiful here - she understands that it is too simple, in fact too wrongheadedly easy, to vilify Deirdre. The woman was unwell to begin with, a condition only exacerbated by Dr. Finch’s unstudied dispensation of narcotics. Deirdre is a woman with vivid dreams of being a famous poet, and while these dreams even in her saner years verged on delusion, one cannot be thought crazy for wanting something so much they could almost taste it. This is not a crime. Bening gives Deirdre’s deep desires justification, explaining Deirdre to us in ways we surely would never have understood on our own. I understand that the disappointments of Deirdre's life were concussive, constant shocks to her system from which she was never able to regain her balance. And even as Bening doesn't let us off the hook in making us understand Deirdre, neither does she let Deirdre off the hook - all of that pain and disappointment catches up with Deirdre at the end of the movie. Bening's performance is not only Golden-Globe-worthy; it is also Academy-worthy, although she has been completely overlooked there. If I had to, I would recommend Running with Scissors for Annette Bening's work alone.

But I don’t have to. Running with Scissors has a great deal to recommend it. Jill Clayburgh's Agnes Finch is full of pathos, and Evan Rachel Wood (Practical Magic, Thirteen) delivers a solid performance as the mildly rebellious Natalie Finch. Joseph Fiennes is his usual, reliably intense self as the 35-year old gay, crazy Neil Bookman. I imagine Ian McKellan as a better Dr. Finch, but Brian Fox with his quirky elegance does a fine job selling this frustrating yet sympathetic character. Running with Scissors is a funny, heartbreaking, and eminently hopeful tale of one young man's victory over the most unusual and obstreperous circumstances. And while the film has its weak spots - Alec Baldwin (The Departed, The Good Shepherd), never an award-winning actor, turns in an adequate if uninspired and somewhat confusing portrait of Burroughs' father; Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare in Love) stabs feebly at playing a cat-killing crazy girl - these are all but eclipsed by Bening and Cross' vibrant performances, Ryan Murphy's sensitive direction and design, and by Augusten Burroughs' astounding triumph over his childhood. If he hadn’t said it was his life, I wouldn’t have believed it.