This year’s New Directors/ New Films program — the annual survey of emerging artists presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art — is chock-full of unusual stories and unlikable heroes. In keeping with the history of the series, it is a proudly defiant break from Hollywood conventions by a group of filmmakers more interested in pushing the envelope than in reaching the mainstream.

The event’s 37th year kicks off Wednesday night with Courtney Hunt’s “Frozen River,” a recent Sundance hit that bravely confronts the issue of illegal immigration, as seen through the eyes of the financially strapped traffickers who bring the “aliens” across the border. On Thursday, “Munyurangabo” shifts our focus to Rwanda, where director Lee Isaac Chung uses the real experiences of his local cast to breathe life into a story about a nation struggling in the aftermath of genocide.

But cinephiles will have to wait until Friday to catch what may be the series’s most captivating, inscrutable, and jarring entry: “Momma’s Man” is the third feature film by Azazel Jacobs, the son of the renowned avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, but the first of his works to gain access to a wide audience. Another successful Sundance premiere, “Momma’s Man” was one of Park City’s underground success stories, arriving as a relative outlier but slowly sparking buzz among general audiences and critics alike. As the festival progressed, curiosity gave way to a critical consensus, with Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman singling out the film as a work that does “nothing less than re-invent — and purify — that Sundance staple, the quirky, angst-ridden family drama.”

That “re-invention” occurred largely thanks to Mr. Jacobs’s decision to go hyper-personal with his project. His film tells the story of a 30-something man named Mikey (Matt Boren) who travels home to see his parents, but his temporary visit turns into a drawn-out affair when something inside him snaps and he finds himself incapable of returning to his wife and child.

It’s a modern story, to be sure, but what really sets it apart is the almost uncomfortably personal angle employed by the director. After casting Mr. Boren in the lead role, Mr. Jacobs convinced his real-life parents, Ken and Flo, to play the roles of Mikey’s parents. And if that weren’t enough, the director decided to shoot the film in his parents’ massive, cluttered TriBeCa loft — his own childhood home.

Richard Peña, an ND/NF curator and the chief programmer at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, said recently that it wasn’t just Mr. Jacobs’s story he found captivating, but also the movie’s insights into the film culture of New York.

“It’s a fascinating story, but it’s also a view of New York’s cultural and artistic scene that’s different than what we’ve seen before,” Mr. Peña said. “I’ve known [Mr. Jacobs’s] parents a long time, and to be able to see inside their house — I think it will play very well in New York, in San Francisco, and all those places where they have these artistic communities. Also, anyone who has children can identify with this theme: the return of the kids. It used to be when kids turned 17 or 18, you were sorry to see them go. But now the reality, as parents turn 52 or 53, is that the children return.”

For his part, Mr. Jacobs is aware of the many layers at work here, specifically the way parents may be intrigued by a story involving a middle-age child being lulled back into the safety of the nest, and the way in which fans of avant-garde cinema will relish the opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of the Jacobs family.

“I started realizing that if I was going to make the film in this space, there’s no way I could remove my parents from it,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I knew how good Matt was, that he was somebody who could spearhead this thing and make these actions and these little movements, and I think it’s even more interesting to have my parents there, to see how they would respond since they’re not professional actors.”

The effect is captivating. As Mikey slowly degenerates, refusing to return his wife’s phone calls and all but hiding out in his bedroom, the concerned and at times awkward reactions from his parents are painfully believable. Indeed, their worries set up the movie’s most extreme sequence, in which a wide-eyed and panicking Mikey finds himself trapped in his parents’ apartment, looking down the stairs leading out to the street, unable to take a step forward.

That scene, like so much of “Momma’s Man,” plays out silently. As Mr. Jacobs developed the script, sifting the words with each successive draft and modifying the story to show this emotional implosion in purely visual terms, he said he knew he was making a movie that flew in the face of conventional technique. Even still, the wide range of reactions that “Momma’s Man” has elicited at Sundance and elsewhere has caught the director off guard.

“There were screenings at Sundance far beyond anything I could have hoped for, with audiences connecting and responding,” he said. “And then there was another screening, which seemed like a special private event for benefactors or something, where a third of the audience left before the titles were over. I guess you could read a little description of this, and it could sound like ‘Little Miss Sunshine,’ a quirky and funny movie about a man acting like a child and abandoning his family. But believe me, this is not ‘Little Miss Sunshine.'”

ssnyder@nysun.com

The 37th New Directors/New Films series begins Wednesday and runs through April 6, with screenings at the Film Society’s Walter Reade Theater and MoMA’s Titus 1Theater.”Momma’s Man” screens Friday at 6:15 p.m. and Saturday at 1 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at tickets.filmlinc.com.