Cowards Bend the Knee takes place inside a drop of sperm, and there is no double entendre to be read into that: the movie begins with a scientist releasing a specimen of ejaculate under a microscope and peering inside, whereupon the sample proves a kind of microcinema beaming out a fragmented and perverted retelling of Maddin’s own youthful sexual angst. A histrionic autobiography that could serve as a loose companion piece to his later My Winnipeg, Maddin’s film explores in narrative form the same frazzled ambivalence toward his own roots that he tackled directly in quasi-documentary shape later on. Darcy Fehr plays Guy as the standout player on the Winnipeg Maroons (the cartoonish glories of hockey being shown for the first time by the director as a formative experience), though his idyllic role in the community starts to crumble when he becomes entangled with a Chinese beauty named Meta—a mad fixation that leads him to the macabre office of a hairdresser-cum-abortionist. Divided into ten mischievously titled chapters, Maddin’s ludicrously eroticized tale of fear and desire rings hilarity and strange pathos out of the alarming adolescent realization that the body can take control over the mind.