Concert films can be boring to an outsider, but sometimes the filmmaker and the musician are on the exact same wavelength and you don't have to be a fan of the music to get the groove. Live Tape is a tiny lo-fi miracle, a perfect matching of sensibilities between director Tetsuaki Matsue and musician Kenta Maeno, sometimes called the "Bob Dylan of Japan."

Both of them had bad 2008's, full of loss and, desperate to change their lives in 2009, they met up on New Year's day to shoot a concert film in one exhilirating, increasingly complicated 74-minute take. The camera follows Maeno through the streets of Tokyo as he belts out his music and occasionally runs into members of his band, the David Bowies, who accompany him. Passersby do their best to ignore him as he sings about sex, masturbation, about how life is as boring as tofu and compulsively checking his email.

It doesn't sound like much, but halfway through the movie, Tetsuaki begins to hassle Maeno from behind the camera, cajoling him into giving a better performance and making fun of him for hiding behind his sunglasses. They begin to talk and Maeno starts exposing his wounds: his struggle to be a musician, his mom's lukewarm support and his dad's sudden death from a heart attack. By the time he breaks out "Weather Forecast," the song he wrote for his dad, screaming out "Love changes into courage/Life goes on," to anyone who'll listen, Live Tape has been galvanized and electrified. It's become more than just another movie about a guy playing the guitar, and has turned into a collaboration between two young artists who are desperate to make a mark on the world before life passes them by. Their heartbreak is shot into the sky like a flare to light up the future, a homing beacon for all the bruised souls who somehow keep going, a signal fire made of glorious noise.