My first memory of my father is set in a small upper Michigan airport circa 1974—him looking on as my sister and I impatiently wriggled though sitting still for a garish colored chalk drawing being committed to a thin, brown paper canvas not unlike a recycled grocery sack. This immediately dated image and style would later hang framed in our home for the next decade. It was an oddly static portrait and to this day I am puzzled by the artist’s paper choice, which gave my sister and I—of Swedish and German heritage, both blonde haired and blue-eyed—the impression of being light-skinned African American towheads.

I’m guessing writer/director Jordan Roberts’ recollections of his own father aren’t so inconsequential. Owning a paternal history that’s dissimilar to my own but a commonly told modern tragedy, Roberts grew up the product of an absentee father who just couldn’t—or wouldn’t—stick around his boyhood Rogers Park neighborhood on Chicago’s north side. In his new film Around the Bend, a well-acted semi-autobiographical take on his adult reunion and fumbling relationship with his own father—who showed up one day on his doorstep after missing decades of his son’s life—Roberts focuses on four generations of men in one family who develop and test their bonds on an unorthodox seriocomic road trip.

Says Roberts, "Growing up, I didn’t know my dad. He showed up on my doorstep as an adult and we had these kind of volatile, absurd dances with one another over the course of several visits. I started writing about it a long time ago and it became clear eventually that the story was a personal one, and by that I mean an emotional one. I wanted the film to be not simply a cathartic experience for me but also an experience other people could identify with."

Draft after draft, Roberts toiled away on his screenplay until the number of rewrites hit 32. "Eighteen months ago when my father passed away," he recollects, "I sat down and I wrote it again. And then I knew it was the story I wanted to tell. It was genuinely emotionally effective to me that these men felt honest and masculine. I’m delighted to spend time with these guys in their silence and in their ineffectually mutterings of some sort of faulty emotion."

Roberts is right about the delicate emotional notes that form the core relationship between stars Josh Lucas as the nice-guy son and legendary Christopher Walken, cutting powerfully to the heart of a man living with regrets. As Roberts puts it, "It was kind of a fragile piece of storytelling. It exists in thin air in a weird way. Its beats are all emotional. They are all invisible. As a result, it’s an extremely complicated film to make. I think the film is extraordinarily hopeful and humanist. Those aren’t the keystones of our culture right now."

Not that Around the Bend is a maudlin ride. Though it’s got its share of sentiment, it’s often quite funny. Says Roberts, "Throughout history, dramas used to include comedy. All of Shakespeare’s dramas are hysterically funny. In the last 15-20 years, studios got very frightened of what they call mixed genres. I wanted to blow that out of the water."

Curiously prominent in the film’s cross country odyssey is a heavy use of fast food restaurant KFC, employed as a roadside port of call that fulfills the dying wish of the family patriarch, played warmly by Michael Caine. Roberts’ less than affectionate take on the chicken empire is one of being a "…plastic, banal, fluorescent torture chamber to begin a spiritual journey." But before you write it off as strategic product placement, he explains, "My personal belief is that if we’re going to get better as individuals, as a culture, as a planet, we’ve got to start right now. We start in Jerusalem. We start in KFC. We start where we are. And I love the iconography everywhere of a dead colonel that kind of looks like Michael Caine."