I just finished listening to the audiobook version of Steve Martin's Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life.

The memoir is, at heart, a sort of "giving back" to adoring fans and aspiring performers, as the once happy-footed man revisits — after twenty-five years away — the standup-comedy career that simply owned the late 1970s comic zeitgeist.

Like Johnny Carson, about whom Martin writes revealingly, he's an extraordinarily likable comic whose offstage persona can seem affectless and aloof. Defying his own reticent nature, he offers an intimate look at his childhood and his development as an artist and entertainer.

In his halcyon, white-suited days, he would say it was important never to alienate his audience, adding "otherwise, I would be like Dimitri in La Condition Humaine."

I love that joke, because je suis un "reverse snob."

Sometimes it takes a little convincing for me to take in a foreign film or an "art film." A foreign-language film by a big-deal artist? That can be a stretch for a cineaste whose tastes run toward the classic American film (something I have in common with nouvelle vague directors like Truffaut).

So, it was with reluctance and willful ignorance about Julian Schnabel and his paintings and highly touted films (Basquiat, Before Night Falls), that I attended Sunday’s screening of his Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art.

The film, now in limited release, scored Schnabel a Best Director award at Cannes. And it had me at bonjour.

It's based on the true story of Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was paralyzed head-to-toe when a stroke resulted in "locked-in syndrome."

He could communicate only by blinking his left eye, the organ from whose point-of-view nearly the entire film is shot.

That perch turns out to be an awfully good place to reflect on the Big Questions of life and love in a surprisingly unpretentious way. Well, there is Tom Waits on the soundtrack, but c'est la vie. Ronald (The Pianist) Harwood's script makes us identify with Bauby, rather than pity him. And the cast (all unfamiliar to moi, excepting the indestructible Max von Sydow) and the actual hospital where the events took place make for an utterly convincing journey into the protagonist’s head.

After the showing, Schnabel sauntered in, dressed in a topcoat, sportcoat, pajamas, and sneakers. Lacking the artist's eye, I couldn't be sure if the pants were sweatpants or the matching PJ bottoms, but I'm pretty sure that was a pajama top. Schnabel, apparently, is legendary for shunning restrictive clothing.

Told that Boston film critics just gave him a couple of more awards, he said, disarmingly, "I like to win awards." The quotes here are paraphrases, since typing on an iPhone compares unfavorably to blinking one's words.

Among Schnabel's observations was "I don't want movies to be paintings, and paintings to be movies."

Describing how a childhood fear of death and the relatively recent loss of his parents drew him into this material, he made a rather remarkable claim about the cathartic benefits of making the film: "I'm not afraid to die anymore."

As for me, I'm no longer afraid to add Schnabel's other high-concept art films about creatives in crisis to my Netflix list.