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A good friend of mine landed on a theme recently that, to my surprise, ties together nicely much of what I see and do in the every day. Though a stretch sometimes, his idea seems to bring sense to the reasons why I – for now – align with certain things while leaving others by the wayside.

I argued that I enjoy the “newness” of things, like watching bar bands play record release shows in front of a few dozen people or, say, taking a step back to track the identity of a grassroots initiative I’m a part of that earlier in the year celebrated its half-birthday.

My friend took it a step further by saying I seem to enjoy purity. You know, latching on to things before they go commercial or are simply destroyed. Being there at the onset to see an idea take shape, and relishing in its glory before inevitable evolution.

With this in mind, it makes just perfect sense to me why I’ve become gently fascinated with mumblecore, an at-times guilty pleasure of a filmmaking movement that can’t be more than a handful of years old. I’ve seen three movies that would quality under the intimate and small mumblecore umbrella, and can think of two more that are either queued up and ready to go or are en route to me through inter-library loan.

Mumblecore, then – I’ve only learned the term myself in the past few months – is a genre of films dedicated to a) super low budgets, b) young actors – who you probably don’t know – working together through relationships and personal issues and c) improvisation. The films I’ve seen generally don’t have much story to tell. They rely more so on rawness and small shoestring budgets for their cred.

Of the three I’m familiar with, The Puffy Chair, Hannah Takes the Stairs and Baghead, the latter is probably the most accessible for toying with another genre – horror – altogether. It’s about a group of four friends who spend a weekend in a cabin in the woods hashing out a story about a killer who preys on young 20-somethings with a bag over his or her head. Soon enough, they’re really terrorized by a mystery person in the flesh with, yep, a bag over his or her head.

The Puffy Chair and Hannah Takes the Stairs, meanwhile, are more what mumblecore aims to be, I think. They’re less commentary on already established genre on the cheap and more about young people who work through problems and obstacles on their way to gaining a little maturity. The Puffy Chair, at least, is backboned by a road trip in search of the titular chair. Hannah Takes the Stairs never leaves the city it originates in – Chicago – and follows a young woman’s summer of casual flings.

Hannah Takes the Stairs, actually, isn’t about much of anything. And that’s the beauty of it. Some criticized the lack of plot. I, after some thought, applauded the lack of one. Hannah defied what we come to expect from movies when its stripped-down storytelling failed to appoint a bad guy or another typical convention. It’s a movie about the fluidity of relationships. And that, I guess, is really it.

While these movies seem to mostly concern themselves with being uber real – cheap filmmaking equipment, cinema verite, actors with little to no visibility in Hollywood, etc. etc. – it’s interesting to me that rarely does mumblecore augment its realism by making off-handed references to true-life settings.

Hannah Takes the Stairs, as I said, is set in Chicago, but it very well could have been filmed in another major city. I don’t remember a single shot in the movie that captured enough street intersection or skyline to be a recognizable chunk of the Windy City. Even more, I heard just one spoken reference to a real Chicago establishment – it so happened to be one of my favorite music clubs, The Empty Bottle! – before the movie was done. Why mention the Bottle at all if only to tease Chicagoans into thinking their mental maps of Illinois’ biggest city would actually come in handy here? It was frustrating.

Anyway, some time has passed since mumblecore’s inception, and already the genre has anointed the industry with a handful of names. I’m mostly thinking about actress Greta Gerwig and filmmakers (slash brothers) Mark and Jay Duplass. Gerwig’s big break came in the form of Greenberg, which had her playing female lead opposite Ben Stiller. As for the Duplasses, they were the men behind Cyrus, the indie dramedy with John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill and Marisa Tomei that some people said was “mumblecore enough” to qualify as a piece of the movement.

I don’t know, though. Cyrus’ mainstream names and $7 million budget seem to suggest something else.

Tracking where these three go, though, may make for another offbeat hobby of mine. Were Greenberg and Cyrus preludes to more mainstream careers, or mere distractions for the young ones as they recharged their mumblecore batteries? Better yet, what will become of mumblecore if a trio of its influentials leaves the movement outright?