The Astronaut Farmer begins on a beach with a shot of an astronaut on horseback. For an instant I thought I was trapped in a Planet of the Apes sequel.

Far from another Hollywood knockoff, Mark and Michael Polish’s The Astronaut Farmer is the most original and intelligent film about an American dreamer since Jonathan Demme’s equally Capra-crazed masterwork Melvin and Howard.

Billy Bob Thornton, looking like Bogart and acting like Jimmy Stewart, plays Charles Farmer, a NASA dropout who really wants to be a spaceman when he grows up. Working alone, Farmer spent a decade building a Mercury rocket in his family’s barn located in Story, Texas.

Beneath the hanging aircraft at the Aero Space museum, I spoke with identical twin auteurs Mark and Michael Polish and their radiant star, Virginia Madsen. Billy Bob, who was supposed to make it a foursome, had a family emergency and was forced to make a last-minute cancellation. My guess is that he removed the vial of Angelina Jolie’s blood from his neck and it left an indelible stain like a shoplifting security device.

When envisioning the Polish Bros. creative process, images of the duo, conjoined and still in their Twin Falls Idaho garb, locked in a dungeon with quivering quill pens in hand, came to mind. Writer/actor/producer Mark was the first to chime in. “Whoever comes up with the idea usually writes the first outline.” Writer/director/producer Michael continued: “We’ll each go do a draft, pass them back and forth and within a couple of weeks we’ll have something to read. We have the same way of thinking when it comes to stories.”

As though perfectly timed by the great PR Gods in the sky, The Astronaut Farmer had its landing heralded by the astronaut “harmer” Lisa Nowack. After swapping diaper jokes Mark concluded: “Today, bad publicity doesn’t seem to hurt anything. When it first came out my dad called me from Montana and he goes, ‘This is going to hurt you guys, right?’ He’s from a time when something like this could conceivably be harmful. The word ‘astronaut’ is in a lot of headlines which is definitely good for us.”

The first question a lot of people ask is where did Charles get the money to build a rocket in his back yard. “It’s a fantasy,” Michael laughed, “Whatever happened to entertainment?” Mark took the question more seriously. “Yeah, it’s a fantasy,” he interjected, “but, also, there’s five vessels awaiting FAA clearance. Nobody wants to do their research. The guy in Minnesota has a launch, there’s a guy in Northern California, there’s a guy in the Pacific Northwest, and each have rockets sitting on their pad[s] waiting for clearance.”

Sure enough, I Googled “man made rocket” and found several other “farmers” with ships awaiting approval. “They’re not a Mercury Atlas like in our movie, “Michael added. “We wanted that to be cinematic. They’re more like Spaceship 1.”

From the outset, the Polish Brothers have filmed in Panavision. “I love it,” Michael gushed. “It goes beyond my peripheral vision and I like it that way.”

Indeed, much of the film’s beauty lies in the meticulously, at times surrealistic, widescreen compositions. “You gotta frame things that are beyond TV,” he continued. “I went to art school, and just from an artistic approach the compositions work better; you can fit more people in them.”

Of course, close-ups are problematic in widescreen. “Close-ups are overrated,” Mark said. “There is a time and place for them, but whenever I do a close-up, I always think to go even tighter.”

Our 15 minutes together led to 30, and it was time to usher out the behind-the-scenes visionaries and bring on the talent.

One of the wisest nuggets of proper showbiz etiquette came to me from my legendary colleague Fred Saxon. Never tell a celebrity that they look better in person. They make their living coming to you on a screen, and that’s where they want to come across their best.

I resisted saying it to Ms. Madsen, although it certainly was applicable. Looking half her age in a hoodie and black jeans, she didn’t stop smiling once during the course of the interview. Why should she? After years of establishing a sizable reputation in a vast array of indie and commercial features, she has finally reached the point when audiences and critics alike have finally embraced her as an actress to reckon with.

Knowing that she is a former Chicagoan, we began by lamenting the loss of quality egg rolls and how the boxes that Chicago pizzas come in taste better than just about anything cooked in California ovens.

Playing the mother of three and Jimminy Cricket to Billy Bob’s boy astronaut provided Madsen with the most difficult role in the piece. “It was a great script,” she noted. “I didn’t have to try and get them to develop things for the female role or any of that stuff.”

She had a lot to say on the role that wives and mothers play in most commercial films: “More often than not, the wives in films are relegated to the background with the children. A woman’s always got something to say,” she chuckled. “I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t have some type of response at least one time in the film.”

This is a movie about working hard to make your dreams come true, something Madsen is very familiar with. “I can identify with that,” she said. “My rocket was Hollywood. I was a fireman’s daughter who wanted to be a professional actress, so that pretty much was as crazy as building a rocket.”

She has worked consistently since her 1983 debut in Class, but confided, “I’m not always in great projects.” At the beginning of the decade, I feared we’d forever lose her to made-for-cable movies. “I didn’t work much then,” she remembered. “My career was like a runaway train going in the wrong direction. The only way to change it was to crash it, and I had to stop working.”

She wasn’t big box office, didn’t bring financing and many of the people she auditioned for didn’t think that she was any good. She recalled undertaking “a real uphill climb to change the industry’s perceptions of who I was and what I could do. Losing my house didn’t get me down as much as being underestimated. As a woman that just pissed me off.” She let lose a sigh of relief followed by a triumphant laugh. “I got mad enough that I changed everything.”

Her role as the sobering ray of beauty in Sideways gave her career a new lease on life. “It allowed the industry and audiences to see me,” she remembered. “Not physically see me, but to see who I was. I was labeled certain things like the lady on Lifetime television, but no one ever got to see really what I do.” She had roles many in small films with little or no distribution. “Sideways was just another one of those independent films, but this one got seen and became a success.”

She didn’t believe her agent when he said it was a performance that would change her life. “It did,” she nodded. “Going through an awards season with a movie like that gave me a lot of confidence.” Pausing for a moment she continued: “There was a lot of shaming of me when I was younger. Now I’m in my 40s, and it’s great. You can’t touch me, man!”

“Fifty?” She shuddered. “That’s going to be a different story. That’s like a big number Hollywood can’t deal with yet.”

The Astronaut Farmer is that rarity among Hollywood family fare; a PG-rated film that refuses to talk down to audience members of any age. It’s a great time at the movies and one that I highly recommend.