One thing you can look forward to after Gay Pride and Father’s Day is a film that’s an almost perfect entertainment for those two neighboring celebrations. Opening July 1st in Florida, Beginners is a true story that reverses a moment found in countless gay-themed movies.

Rather than the son coming out to his father, it’s the father, Christopher Plummer, who comes out to his straight son, Ewan McGregor. And what follows is not the usual anguish and incrimination, but a touching and revealing account of how self-acceptance is the first step for everyone when it comes to falling in love.

Ewan McGregor plays Oliver, a graphic designer who seems to be going through a mid-life crisis several years before he’s supposed to have one. He’s adrift both personally and professionally when his life is turned topsy-turvy after his mother dies and his father, Hal, announces he’s gay, has always been gay, and is now going to live the rest of his life with a flamboyant enthusiasm. “I don’t want to be theoretically gay,” Hal explains to his startled son.

Oliver has had a series of short and not-so-happy relationships, something he blames on the lifeless marriage of his parents, but then he sees his father at age 75 blossom and fall in love for the first time in his life with a 39 year-old named Andy. And with that positive example before him, Oliver finds himself increasingly involved with a French actress with an equally fickle history. Anna is played by the beautiful Mélanie Laurent, who starred in Inglorious Bastards.

The repressive Oliver often ends up expressing his true feelings to his father’s dog, a Jack Russell terrier, who comments back to the audience in succinct subtitles, thus proving what canine lovers have long suspected – dogs understand the foibles of human beings better than we do ourselves.

The central situation actually happened to the writer-director Mike Mills, and Beginners has the rhythm and resonance of something that’s been lived and not just imagined. And it also has the weakness of many an autobiographical- based movie in that it’s more moving in moments than it is as a whole. Memory is, by its nature, episodic, so the story goes back and forth in time as Oliver works his way toward a new understanding of his father and of himself.

The Vice-Versa Film of 2011

All the performances are masterful, including that Jack Russell, and one can hope that this role might earn Christopher Plummer the Oscar that has eluded him so far.

One critic complained that it wasn’t feasible for a man of 39 to fall in love with a man of 75 years, thus revealing that critic’s narrow views and narrow acquaintances. The verities and varieties of the human heart are far more mysterious and extensive than our puny categories can encompass.

And unlike the usual soap-opera that dominates so many gay-themed stories, Beginners is filled with hilarity and hopefulness as people struggle to find that precarious balance between head and heart.

The simple and sweet message of this delightful film is that when it comes to love and relationships, all of us, regardless of age or orientation, are – and always will be – beginners.

Beginners will be released in theatres nationwide July 1st. Check your local listings for theatres and movie times.