Some people, when looking for meaning in life, are content to ponder the deeper existential dilemmas over cups of coffee and buttered croissants. Forrest Bess, a painter of the abstract expressionist school (for lack of better categorization), was a man with a unique vision that led him down the path to unusual obsession.

This documentary tells a story of self-mutilation and madness, about this man who developed his own twilight variety of mystical science -- a science that requires a dangerous and intimate alteration of one’s own flesh in the hope that the result will be transformation into a higher form. The story has the aesthetic of a David Cronenberg film made real.

Bess once wrote to a friend, "Art is a search for beauty. Not a superficial beauty, but a very deep longing for a uniting of all lost parts." In his own search for self-actualization, Bess began a detailed study of Jungian psychology, alchemy, and primitive symbolism, as these things most closely touched upon what he felt was being expressed through his own paintings. His conclusion, after years of research, combined with his own suppressed notions of his sexuality, was that he needed to unite his male and female sides by becoming a hermaphrodite. This then became manifest in a fixation to create a slit at the base of his penis, a kind of surrogate vagina.

Bess wrote to his friend art historian Meyer Shapiro, about his self-surgery: "I hacked away, scared as hell. A terrific cramp came in my side. The razor blade slipped down from my hand and I was knocked on the floor. What had happened, I don’t know. But, Meyer, the unconscious flooded in beautifully. I had found entrance to the world within myself, a beautiful dimension."

Via interviews and numerous images of the artist’s unusual, penetrating, and dreamlike paintings, we are gradually shown a fascinating portrait of a startling, little understood visionary who sought a deeper truth that always frustratingly remained just out of his grasp.