The drifter has two mommies: the true story of a mother in search of her long-lost gay son inspired writer-director Tim Kirkman's moving new film, Loggerheads.

In the remarkable indie movie Loggerheads, handsome drifter Mark (Kip Pardue) lands in a North Carolina coastal town and falls into a relationship with local motel owner George (Michael Kelly). In parallel stories, two women wonder about the fate of a lost son: the biological child of Grace (Bonnie Hunt), given up for adoption as an infant, and the estranged son of preacher's wife Elizabeth (Tess Harper). It doesn't take long for the savvy viewer to figure out that Mark is the missing link between the story lines. He's the son who lost one mother at birth, then lost his adopted family when he came out as gay and his dad disowned him.

If the conceit seems too precious to be true--particularly under the metaphoric umbrella of the loggerhead turtles, who abandon their eggs on the beach to fend for themselves--writer-director Tim Kirkman wants you to know that, in fact, it's all true. Well, most of it.

In real life Kirkman is friends with the "Grace" of the film. "She opened her life to me, giving me all her son's journals, poems, photographs, letters he had written to her and never mailed. I thought I would try to make a documentary out of it," adds the maker of the 1998 "mothers against Jesse Helms" documentary, Dear Jesse. "But the more I found out about him, the more I realized I would reach more people if it were a fictional film."

Fictionalizing the story also allowed Kirkman to dramatize the adoptive parents, who have refused to talk to the filmmaker or to their son's biological mother. Not knowing what drove them to reject their child, Kirkman turned the dad into a preacher, played by Chris Sarandon in a mesmerizing low-key performance that's light-years away from his Oscar-nominated scenery shredding as a transsexual in Dog Day Afternoon. "This part of the culture seemed to be at a fever pitch: ministers as the [leading] voice of the gay rights opposition," Kirkman says. "I thought, This is not right."

As for the turtles: Kirkman moved the real-life Mark's lover from landlocked Boone, N.C., to the coast in his screenplay in order to make use of the Darwinian metaphor. Then he got the young man's journals, and there on the covers of the notebooks were pictures of turtles. Honest.