A cursor appears on a blank screen, blinking, waiting. And then text appears: “This probably shouldn’t be a film ... but it is.”

A purposefully ironic admission for a movie called “My First Film,” but a great way to set the tone for what follows. In 2018, filmmaker Zia Anger sat before an audience at a Brooklyn venue, pulling up video clips on her computer from a project entitled “Always All Ways, Anne Marie” that she’d shot and then abandoned years earlier, combining them with spoken and typed words. The presentation morphed into a live performance that Anger toured called “My First Film,” which then further evolved into a digital performance during a pandemic-locked world.

I’d seen various iterations of “My First Film,” but the new feature film version, also directed by Anger (and written with Billy Feldman), still came as a surprise to me. It’s as personal and experimental as the live presentations, but mixes fiction (or perhaps autofiction) into the recipe, producing something that looks and acts a little more like a traditional movie. “My First Film” stars Odessa Young as Vita, a Zia stand-in, who is telling us the story of the making of her first film, also entitled “Always All Ways, Anne Marie.” The screenplay of that movie was about a young woman caring for her ailing father. She gets pregnant and leaves home in search of her mother, who had abandoned her.

The “Always All Ways, Anne Marie” story is a version of Vita’s reality, just as Vita’s story is a version of Anger’s. But it’s also different, and Vita wonders aloud, in a way that feels appropriate to a 25-year-old first-time filmmaker with dreams of artistic authenticity, about whether it still gets at her emotional truth. Vita wasn’t abandoned by her mother — in fact, she had two mothers, and they raised her together, and she felt loved and supported throughout her childhood. Various other pieces of Vita’s real life refract through “Always All Ways, Anne Marie,” while her narration about drama on set and off give the story of “My First Film” shape.

Everything in “My First Film” doubles back on itself, which can make it feel repetitive at times. If you’ve never been a young person harboring dreams of creative genius, it might start to feel a little forced, a little twee. Even if you have, impatience lurks.

But those who’ve been that person, or been around that person, will most likely find themselves nodding, or cringing, in wry recognition. Anger knows how to rescue Vita from being just another lightly irritating would-be genius: She explicitly implicates herself, the author of this work, in all of Vita’s hand-wringing and attempts at greatness. This happens explicitly near the film’s moving end. But it’s woven throughout the film, too, with some of Anger’s own documentary footage cut into Vita’s memories and life, melding author and character in ways that artists often resist. I don’t know which parts of Vita’s life are drawn directly from Anger’s and which are her invention, but it doesn’t really matter — this is deeply personal work, and it shows.

That’s even more clear in the film’s prevailing metaphor, which casts artistic creation in terms of pregnancy and birth, as well as abortion. The surprise and the struggle, the decision to not carry an artwork to term or to begin again even though the last time was painful — it’s all part of the process of bringing something new into the world. Artists create by processing their worlds and reproducing them — Vita, or maybe Anger, calls it “giving birth to yourself.” It’s impossible, and it’s a miracle.

The irony of “My First Film” is its two layers: It’s not Anger’s first film, nor is it Vita’s, but it tells the story of one that never quite made it into the world. But really, it’s a movie about learning to have compassion for your younger self, for her dreams and foibles and failures. The older you get, the more you realize that process will never be done. The act of creation is an act of reinvention. Every film, so to speak, is the first one.