What could Jesse Helms possibly have in common with Tim Kirkman: one, the conservative outspoken enemy of homosexuals and abortion rights advocates, the other a left-wing progressive Democrat and gay activist? It is this question that the filmmaker brilliantly investigates in his simultaneously comic and serious autobiographical film. Born in the same town as Helms, Kirkman returns home to North Carolina to take a trip into the personal and the political, into the past and the future, into his and Jesse’s lives, and into the lives of the many people he meets along the way. A wonderful cinematic storyteller, he has an eye and an ear for perceptive words and telling gestures, and reveals perplexing truths and ironies about the people of this country.