One of the great early Mad magazine spreads guessed at what was going to happen when the children of Beatniks rebelled against their parents--they'd get haircuts, dress conservatively, bring home perfect report cards. That's the premise of Lisa Cholodenko's new movie Laurel Canyon, starring Christian Bale as Sam, a Harvard Medical School graduate specializing in psychiatry who, having taken an internship in Los Angeles, accepts his mother's offer to stay in her empty Laurel Canyon house. He and his even more tightly buttoned girlfriend Alex (Kate Beckinsale)--also a Harvard med grad, now working on a dissertation about the reproductive life of house flies--arrive at the house only to find that Sam's mother Jane (Frances McDormand), a successful, progressive rock producer, is staying in the house with a band whose record has run into trouble with the label and whose lead singer, only a tad older than Sam and Alex, is Jane's latest lover.

Laurel Canyon is a weirdly scruffy crevice of L.A., not visibly affected by the city's yuppie upgrade in the '80s and '90s. The movie's early tour of its unkempt lawns and rusty cars makes it clear that the Canyon is still the place Joni Mitchell was singing about in her song "Ladies of the Canyon" on the classic 1970 album of the same name. (Jane has a photo of herself with Mitchell hanging on the wall of the house.) When Sam and Alex walk in with their efficient rolling carry-on bags, Jane and the band are doing bong hits--Jane smokes pot the way Bette Davis used to smoke cigarettes, constantly--and after worrying about whether Alex will be able to get her thesis written with the band hanging out downstairs and recording in the studio down by the pool, and whether Sam will be able to tolerate staying in close quarters with a mother whose unconventional looseness makes him feel as if he's being dragged back to the chaos of his childhood, the couple decides to stay, provisionally.

The movie shows us how exposure to the creative disorder of these rock artists operates on this couple whose ambitious severity (they play Scrabble competitively on the airplane west) has them fitted uncomfortably in an airless relationship. The subtlest aspect of the movie is its attention to how Sam and Alex conceal information from each other as they start opening up despite themselves to their new environment. Sam works at the hospital with an Israeli intern named Sara (Natascha McElhone), who begins flirting with him before they've even met. Soon he's suggesting to Alex that they should move to North Hollywood, without telling her that's where Sara lives. But while he's at work all day, Alex becomes intrigued by Ian (Alessandro Nivola), the lead singer, who is openly into her. Once Sam starts carpooling with Sara, Alex can see what's going on between them, and he can see her see it, but he doesn't say anything and she seems to take this reticence as license to do a little experimentation of her own. She also protects her access to Ian and the studio by turning down a nice little house in North Hollywood that Sam sends her to check out, telling him falsely that it was already rented.