Crispin Glover has two very different movies coming out this month, and together they sum up a lot about the 43-year-old actor. On November 16, Mr. Glover will appear as the beastly Grendel in Robert Zemeckis’s “Beowulf,” a $150 million motion-capture-animated blockbuster playing on more than 4,000 screens. Five days later, at New York’s IFC Center, Mr. Glover will launch his second directorial effort, “It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine!,” a sexually graphic fantasymelodrama starring and written by a cerebral palsy sufferer that is touring one theater at a time.

“It’s specifically designed to be coming out at the exact same time as ‘Beowulf,'” Mr. Glover said. “Just the small runoff from that film will be far greater publicity than I could generate myself.”

Thus speaks the voice of experience for perhaps Hollywood’s most dogged eccentric — if indeed the self-conceived avantgardist could still be considered a Hollywood entity. Fans of Mr. Glover have long tracked quirky performances and outsider antics, but many may yet be surprised to learn of his intrepid directorial forays somewhere beyond good and evil. “It Is Fine,” the second installment of an ambitious trilogy, follows last year’s release, “What Is It?,” a phantasmagoria of provocation that deployed actors with Down syndrome, blackface minstrelsy, snail murder, Shirley Temple, and masked masturbators.

This is a few steps beyond the culture-jamming karate kick of Mr. Glover’s infamously erratic appearance on “Late Night with David Letterman” 20 years ago, not to mention his winning turn as the bullied George McFly in “Back to the Future.” But while “What Is It?” was an open assault on cultural taboos, Mr. Glover is highly protective of “It Is Fine” and very specific about crediting its conception. He strives to present Stephen Stewart, the late cerebral palsy victim who wrote and acted in the film, as the movie’s driving force.

“He’s not somebody you’d look at and think, ‘He is a powerful person,'” said Mr. Glover, who met Stewart through the Utah filmmaker David Brothers, who shares directorial credit on “It Is Fine.” Speaking of Stewart, Mr. Glover said, “I don’t know how he did it exactly. But he had a certain power and got us to do this stuff.” Stewart, who spent part of his life locked in a nursing home after his mother’s death, wrote the explicit 120-page screenplay that became “It Is Fine.” He died at age 63 of complications from his condition. In the film, Stewart plays a wheelchair-bound man who falls in love with a sensitive divorcée. When she ultimately rejects him because of his disability, Stewart’s character embarks on homicidal sex romps with a succession of gorgeous women. One by one, they fall for his charms, including the teenage daughter of the spurning lover, only to die at his hands. The resulting melodrama is, as Mr. Glover put it, “a documentation of this man living this particular fantasy.” To that end, Technicolor-caliber hues and artificiallooking sets are employed, and the

s o u n d t r a c k r a n g e s f r o m Beethoven’s 7th Symphony to a gauzy ballad from the 1970s German hard-core series “Schulmädchen-Report.” For the right pitch of heightened emotion, Mr. Glover also sought out and cast the German actress Margit Carstensen, a veteran of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s ’70s melodramas, as the divorcée. (“I would just sit there and watch and I felt like I was watching a Fassbinder film,” Mr. Glover said. “It’s the first film she ever made in the U.S.”)

Flush with “Charlie’s Angels” paychecks from his performance as the Thin Man, Mr. Glover bankrolled the production, but a mortal urgency also drove him. “It became apparent that if we didn’t shoot soon, we could never do it,” he said. “We shot it over the course of six months, and within a month Steve died. I got a call right within the month we finished shooting. Steve was in the hospital, and he was basically asking us to make sure we had enough footage to finish the film without him.”

The macabre backstory may not endear Mr. Glover to critics who impugn his motives as essentially exhibitionist. He claims the most surprising response has been “unfounded academic condescension,” which he decries as “antiartistic.” But he does not go halfway in supporting the finished creation. “‘Everything Is Fine’ will probably be the best film I’ll have anything to do with in my career,” Mr. Glover said. “This is a true, good adult film that is dealing with thoughts and feelings that are important. If somebody’s going to attack something, I’d prefer they attack ‘What Is It.'”

Indeed, since making the first film, Mr. Glover has practically developed a stump speech about opposition to the trilogy, railing against what he views as a censorial corporate hegemony.

“‘What Is It’ is almost a thesis statement reacting to how, in corporate funding in the last 30 years or so, anything that can possibly make an audience uncomfortable in any way is necessarily excised or not distributed,” he said. “That’s really damaging to the culture.”

As part of his alternative, Mr. Glover is showing “It Is Fine” (like “What Is It”) with his homemade distribution model, a road show that attaches his own headline appearance to the screening. At each theater, he dramatically narrates a slide show composed of his book collages, which are composed of stuffy or florid 19thcentury tomes on topics ranging from rat-catching to concrete. The retro, pre-cinematic routine, first performed at a 1992 festival in Olympia, Wash., is part Gloverian fetish, part business move. “It’s a very good way to distribute my own films and to be able to recoup on films I’m investing in,” he said.

One supporter, whom Mr. Glover praises for staying true to a vision, is another notorious voyager into the unknown: the great German director Werner Herzog.

“He was very supportive, this film in particular,” Mr. Glover said. “He’s truly helpful to people who are doing their own things. A lot of his other films have very strong male protagonists who have lived outside of the culture, like this film. ‘Grizzly Man’ is just fantastic.”

Which helps explain even more clearly what Mr. Glover saw in Stewart’s single-mindedness. “He was locked in a nursing home for 10 years against his will because he was difficult to understand, but he’s a full-capacity thinker and had a rebellious streak, which is part of what I related to in him.” Whatever the reception for “It Is Fine,” Mr. Glover continues to ensure the self-sufficiency that allows his artistic independence. And what better place to blaze a trail than the Czech Republic? “I bought an old château there that was built in the 1600s,” he said. “Next to it is a horse stable that I’m turning into soundstages. And that’s where I plan to keep making more movies.”