One of the wildest Canadian features in recent years, Leslie, My Name is Evil is a Molotov cocktail of sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, Vietnam and Charles Manson. Doing to everybody’s favourite hippie death cult what Inglourious Basterds did to the Third Reich, it aims to re-invoke the all-American strain of psychosis that connects the Manson murders with the My Lai massacre.

Yet Leslie, My Name is Evil might never have been made if its creator had an iPod. It’s not that director Reginald Harkema ever wanted one of those gadgets. As you might expect from someone who draws so much inspiration from artistic heroes of the past — be they the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s and ’30s, the French New Wave directors of the ’60s, or the punk rockers and political radicals of the ’70s — the Vancouver-bred and Toronto-based filmmaker is strictly a vinyl-only guy.

While working as an editor on another movie several years ago, he got his music fix by playing LPs on his portable player. “So if I glom onto a record,” says Harkema. “I really play it over and over.”

One such record was the self-titled debut album by the Pink Mountaintops, the psychedelic-rock band from Vancouver — a grinding yet heady tune called “Leslie” on Side 2 was a particular favourite.

Around the same time, Harkema found a secondhand copy of Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s 1974 bestseller about the grisly series of murders by followers of Charlie Manson. Since he was born in 1967, the filmmaker had dim memories of how the case played out in the media but much of the story was new to him.

Of the youngsters led astray by the hippie cult leader, Harkema was most fascinated by another Leslie: Leslie Van Houten, who was sentenced to life in prison for her part in the murders of Leno and Rosemary LoBianco.

Recognizing her last name as Dutch, he realized Van Houten had grown up in a Dutch Presbyterian family, “which is a shade different from the Dutch Christian Reformed family that I grew up in,” he says. “She was basically the same age as my mom, so I became intrigued by this question of how this person like my mom became a hippie death-cult murderess.”

Thus did Harkema’s obsessions with the Pink Mountaintops’ song (now heard in Leslie, My Name Is Evil’s opening sequence) and the echoes between Van Houten’s story and his upbringing in B.C. inspire him to create his own Leslie for the screen.

Though Harkema’s movie uses facts from the case, Leslie, My Name Is Evil’s version of events is unmistakably fictional. Blackly satirical yet strangely sincere, the story centres on the courtroom attraction between Leslie and Perry, a straitlaced young juror in her murder trial. But no plot description can accurately indicate the full weirdness of the film’s overtly stylized imagery, deadpan tone and potentially inflammatory content.

It’s the most ambitious production yet for the filmmaker, who first gained note as the editor of such movies as Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo. Turning to directing, Harkema made his feature debut with A Girl is a Girl in 1999 before filming Better Off in Bed, a tour documentary about The New Pornographers that remains unreleased due to the objections of band members who resented the level of exposure. Harkema made the biggest impression on audiences and critics with 2006’s Monkey Warfare, a dark comedy about political radicals and bike activists run amok in Toronto.

Like Monkey Warfare, Leslie, My Name is Evil summons up ghosts of the countercultures of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Yet despite its period setting, Leslie, My Name is Evil is not so much a movie about the ’60s as a reimagining of the era. “It’s more about the audience’s idea of what the ’60s were,” says Harkema, who adds that he was very influenced by Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan fantasia I’m Not There in that respect.

All this makes his movie a prime candidate for cult status, provided it can find an audience that’ll drink its brand of Kool-Aid. As the director says, “It’s clearly a cult movie — it’s about a cult, after all. But whereas there’s that thing with cult movies where you think, ‘Oh, people will discover this movie 10 years from now,’ that’s really not what I want to happen.” Harkema laughs. “I want that cult to form immediately.”