Some time in his early teens Azazel Jacobs did what many kids of that age do: he rebelled by becoming a punk. But, rather than recoil in horror, his parents shook their heads in disappointment that their son would make such a banal and conventional lifestyle choice. “It didn’t allow me to have the punk fantasy,” Jacobs says. “I’m wearing the gear, exactly what you’re supposed to wear. But I couldn’t wholeheartedly enjoy that experience because in the background I have my parents saying: ‘That’s so uniform, so conservative’.”

Jacobs, as his given name suggests, had something of an unconventional upbringing. The name Azazel, an Old Testament fallen angel, is a common curse word in Israel. “I had to go over there for a job and they didn’t want to let me on the plane. It’s like going: ‘Hi, I’m Satan’. It’s a devil’s name. But, for my parents, it’s more of a Prometheus story. He’s a fallen angel for good reasons. I think they liked the idea that it would keep me out of even fantasising about becoming religious in any way.”

His father is the experimental film-maker Ken Jacobs, best known for his seven-hour state-of-the-nation treatise Star Spangled to Death, a collage of found footage and staged performances. His mother, Flo Jacobs, is a painter and Ken’s creative partner as well as his wife. They have lived, in rent-controlled, bohemian chaos, in a loft in the TriBeCa area of New York since long before the area became a destination neighbourhood. “The rents there are between $8,000 and $20,000 a month now,” Jacobs says. “And the dogs that are walking around . . . you know, in LA, it’s all about how big your car is. In TriBeCa, the bigger the dog you have is how you show how big your place is. So there are people walking around with these f***ing dinosaurs.”

The apartment is like a living art installation, crammed from floor to ceiling with the precious ephemera of two extraordinary lives. “Both my folks, especially my father, are in a constant state of being horrified about what goes on in the world,” Jacobs says. “And in a lot of ways that place is somewhere they can insulate themselves with things that they really like and that inspire them.”

The Jacobs home has played its part in New York’s art scene. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were visitors — they dropped by to watch a shadow-play performance by Ken Jacobs’s film students. The comic book artist Art Spiegelman, creator of the seminal graphic novel Maus, was a friend. And the young Azazel frequently fell asleep listening to heated creative debates between the leading lights of American avant-garde film-making, people such as Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka and Jonas Mekas.

“It wasn’t so much what they spoke about that I can remember, what stays with me is how they talked about it, how intense their convictions were. In a lot of ways, conversation was the only pay expected after completing and showing work, and the words about it were vital.”

It is to this rich family environment that Jacobs pays tribute with his third film, the slyly funny and savagely perceptive Momma’s Man. For this micro-budget exploration of family dynamics and the comedy of discomfort, Jacobs commandeered his parents’ apartment for the story’s location. Rather than having to dress the set, they had to move stuff out to fit the camera in. And Jacobs persuaded his parents to star in the film as semi-fictionalised versions of themselves. There’s a son in the movie too, but it’s here that the similarity to the real Jacobs household ends.

Azazel Jacobs is lean and laconic, with a wild mop of curly hair. His alter-ego in the film, Mikey (played by Matt Boren), is soft, slightly shapeless and sketched in washed-out pastel tones. Jacobs has embraced the creative world in which he was raised; Mikey has settled in suburbia with a wife and child, and a nebulous office job. Mikey is a slightly pudgy cuckoo in the nest; to his bemused parents he’s an alien.

“I think that was an important thing to set up in this story, to make it far away enough from me to have fun with and experiment with,” Jacobs says. “What if there was a son — OK, there’s a bond, he’s their son and they love him — but what if there wasn’t the mutual respect of what they had chosen to do?”

Over the course of the film, Mikey, who has dropped in to visit his parents, suffers a slow-burning nervous breakdown and regresses back into his childhood room (in real life, it was Azazel’s own pad) rather than return home to his exhausted wife and their newborn child. His baffled, worried parents try to mitigate Mikey’s crisis with sympathy and light sculptures projected on to the inside of a wedding dress (an actual Flo Jacobs artwork from the 1960s recreated for the movie).

It’s a richly rewarding premise that you could imagine working as a mainstream Hollywood movie starring Adam Sandler. As an idiosyncratic US indie picture, it’s a real discovery.

When asked to compare his work with that of his father, Jacobs muses: “I wouldn’t say that my rebellion is to tell narrative films, but there definitely is a push to communicate with people in a different way. People talk about Momma’s Man being experimental or slow — it doesn’t feel that way. When something feels slow to me it’s something completely else. My dad made a seven-hour film. I have music, I have actors, I have credits and I have lights — this feels like a normal movie to me.”

So were there any Jacobs family creative differences on-set? “Just over the name of their fictitious son, Mikey. They hated it. They just could not understand why they would give a son such a boring name. I tried the usual arguments — that they are not playing themselves exactly; that Mikey is the right name for a child/man. Instead they came up with a different name, ‘Mikaniko’, which they would throw in sometimes when I was shooting, and which I wound up having to cut around later on.

“I don’t blame them. I like Mikaniko a lot better as well. Maybe if I have a son someday, I'll name him that.”

Momma’s Son is released tomorrow

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