A curious story debuted at the festival in main competition on Saturday, May 18 with Arnaud Desplechin’s “Jimmy P” telling of the relationship between a troubled native American vet, played by Benicio del Toro, and his equally idiosyncratic therapist, played by Mathieu Amalric, TheWrap said.

The story of Jimmy Picard (del Toro) is true, and the film is based on a 1951 study by the French ethnopsychiatrist Georges Devereux (Amalric), which tracked the daily treatment of Picard’s debilitating headaches, partial blindness and constant pain.

In minute and often crushingly slow detail, the story plumbs the depths of Picard’s relationship to his native culture and his abandonment of personal responsibilities after his war service, through his friendship with Deveraux.

French filmmaker Desplechin, whose other work has also favored psychoanalysis (“Kings and Queens”), has been working on adapting on this story for a couple of decades, and shot it in Detroit, among other locations.