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"A dream of dark and troubling things" is how David Lynch summarized his debut feature, and that about covers it. Eraserhead isn't quite abstract -- there's a story of sorts, involving Henry (the late, great Jack Nance, sporting that immortal finger-in-the-socket hairdo), his spastic girlfriend, and their mutant baby -- but it isn't quite narrative either. Set in some kind of postindustrial urban wasteland, the film unspools with the surreal anti-logic of a dream, alternately grotesque and black-comic, its incidents and images not reflecting any reality we know (unless your reality includes artificial chickens that crawl off the plate and tiny, pasty-faced women who live inside radiators) but coming close enough to make some sort of sense. The end result is eerie, disturbing, and strangely beautiful (the shadowy black-and-white photography is lovely), if defiantly not for all tastes. And like a dream, Eraserhead is best experienced alone, in the dark.%,