The main character of Taylor Guterson’s new film “Burkholder” has a bold and optimistic view of life — very much like the actor who plays him ­— and he doesn’t mind telling you what he thinks. At all.

“I don’t give a damn,” Teddy says in the film’s trailer. “And you shouldn’t give a damn, either, what people think. They’re expecting the worst, you’re going to show them the best.”

Teddy is played by Bainbridge Island thespian Bob Burkholder, for whom the film is named. Set and filmed on Bainbridge, the stylized and fictional version of the island envisioned by Guterson, in a style made famous in his 2011 breakout hit film “Old Goats,” will once again be gracing the big screen with the impending premiere of this, his latest film.

The film tells the story of Barry (played by Guterson regular Britton Crosley), a landlord whose life is thrown into disarray by the increasingly bizarre and erratic behavior of his long-time elderly tenant.

Teddy has been renting Barry’s basement apartment for more than 20 years. Over that time, they’ve maintained a solid, if subdued, landlord/tenant relationship that borders on real friendship.

But as Teddy gets more and more erratic, the status quo of the two men’s world is disrupted. Whether impulsively buying a dog and giving it free reign of the place before housebreaking it, borrowing Barry’s car for mysterious “photo shoots,” or developing a sudden passion for the bongo drums and late-night jam-sessions, Teddy’s behavior grows increasingly more bizarre, and the slightly younger Barry is by turns vexed, perplexed and annoyed.

In an attempt to bring harmony, or at least equilibrium, back to his home, Barry turns to the only therapeutic resource at his disposal: an underemployed marriage counselor who agrees to work with the odd couple.

The film opens at the Historic Lynwood Theater (4569 Lynwood Center Road NE) Friday, Sept. 19. Though Guterson himself will be out of the state and unable to attend, Crosley will be in attendance.

Burkholder himself, who passed away a year ago, was both the inspiration and motivation for Guterson to make the film. All proceeds from the film’s opening will be donated to Helpline House, a charity of which Burkholder was particularly fond.

“He was a really good friend of mine,” Guterson said of his star. “I don’t think, as long as I keep making movies and working with people, I’ll ever have a kinder relationship than I had with Bob, and Britton too.”

“I’d worked with Bob [before], on a film called ‘Old Goats,’ which had its theatrical release a few weeks prior to Bob’s 90th birthday, and I wanted to do another feature with him while we still had time,” Guterson remembered.

“Bob and his family saw an early cut of the film and really liked it. I was working on a subsequent cut when Bob passed away. I miss Bob very much and I like to think this film serves as a fitting testament to him, both as a great actor and a great man.”

Many of the best moments in the film, Guterson explained, were a combination of his original idea for the scene and the completely improvised interactions and dialogue of Burkholder and Crosley.

“In some scenes they are quite literally fooling around with nothing more than basic direction,” he explained. “There’s very loose direction. There’s other scenes where they’re not memorizing dialogue, but they have to stay close to the script. On the whole, it’s vastly improv. To me, the best moments in the movie are when they’re truly just making things up.”

Though this film is not as humorous in an obvious way, like “Old Goats,” Guterson said that he considers the two films to be similar in style.

“I personally think it is similar,” he said. “I don’t think other people really take it that way. They probably don’t take it that way for a good reason. The humor in ‘Burkholder’ is a little more subtle, or dry perhaps. I think it’s funny. I don’t think people have viewed it the same way as ‘Old Goats’ because Bob passed away and his character was declining in the film, there’s a layer that wasn’t there in ‘Old Goats.’”

Both of the films, however, owe a great debt to Bainbridge Island, Guterson said.

“It would have been impossible to make both films without Bainbridge,” he laughed. “So much support came out of Bainbridge: locations, resources, countless people and businesses.”

A Bainbridge High School alumni, whose father wrote the renowned novel “Snow Falling on Cedars,” Guterson said it was a visit to the set of the film based on his father’s novel that first piqued his interest in filmmaking.

“The director of that film, Scott Hicks, was so nice to me,” explained Guterson. “He’s been super supportive. I’m still in touch with him.”

Ironically, as he himself is only 33 years old, the majority of Guterson’s film work has focused on older characters.

The evolution of those stories, and his decision to explore those characters and issues, is something he said often sparks queries.

“I’ve been asked that question a lot,” he said. “It started early on with the fact that I knew, in some ways, the older folks had the ability to not really act.”

The reality and personality that older actors brought to their roles inspired Guterson, and set his early work apart from the heard of independent films made by film school students and enterprising amateurs featuring their friends and family.

“’How do I differentiate myself from that mess?’ Working with people who are not your age,” Guterson explained. “Using people as, more or less, themselves. The personality they lend to the part is themselves.”

Certainly, that was the case with Crosley and Burkholder, Guterson said.

“The thing about Bob is that he treated it so seriously,” he remembered. “He didn’t have a background in acting. He would read the scripts I would send him in detail and come with a really good knowledge of what we were doing. He loved it. He really wanted to do it for me, both of them did.”

“To have somebody treat it like a job, at that stage in life, really was special to me,” Guterson said.

“I always felt like I was with peers, equals, even though they happened to be older. He was a really good friend of mine. He just happened to be 90.”

To see the film’s trailer, visit www.vimeo.com/92162685 or the film’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/BurkholderFilm.

‘Burkholder’

What: Opening of Taylor Guterson’s new film “Burkholder.”

When: Friday, Sept. 19.

Where: Lynwood Theater (4569 Lynwood Center Road NE).

Admission: Ticket price is $10.25.