Let nobody say writer-director Maryam Keshavarz doesn’t know how to start a movie.
The first time we see Leila, her alter ego in the autobiographical, warm-hearted, personal, funny but also somewhat chaotic “The Persian Version,” she’s walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. Headed to a Halloween party, she’s carrying a surfboard and wearing what she calls a “burkini” — a sexy bikini, but paired with a niqab, the face-covering garment worn by some Muslim women.
It’s surely not an accident that Leila is crossing a bridge, because her film (and Halloween costume) is about bridging two identities — her Iranian heritage, and her American life. Leila (an engaging Layla Mohammadi) is a New York born-and-raised aspiring screenwriter (she wants to be an Iranian Martin Scorsese) who, we learn, has never been fully comfortable in either world. American kids would call her names at school; Iranians saw her as too Americanized.
There are other bridges to be crossed here, too. The most important is that between Leila and her formidable immigrant mother, Shireen (the wonderful Niousha Noor), who created a successful life in America out of sheer grit, educating herself and becoming an adept businesswoman while running a household full of boys and one girl. It’s the girl, Leila, with whom Shireen has the fraught relationship, because — well, if you’re a mother or a daughter you probably get it.
But there’s a deeper backstory behind this troubled dynamic, and to learn all that, we must take a journey — a long journey, in terms of the film’s run time — back to a remote village in 1960s rural Iran. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, because first adult Leila, gay and newly divorced from her wife, gets pregnant with the guy in drag who plays Hedwig on Broadway.
About that Halloween party: Leila wins the costume prize — justifiably! — and also hooks up in a back room with Maximillian (Tom Byrne, charming in a less roguish Hugh Grant way), who’s starring in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” at the Belasco Theatre (where the show did actually run). And when she gets pregnant — professing she didn’t know you could get pregnant from a one-night stand — Max says he’s all in.
Keshavarz, whose film won the audience prize at Sundance, likes a flashback, and one of them takes us back to Leila’s childhood summer trips to Iran, fooling guards at the airport looking for banned American music and videos, and bringing Cyndi Lauper to her Iranian relatives. Who, in turn, dance with abandon to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” — a joyous scene.
