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LITTLE ROCK — Total Badass opens with an Austin City Limit sign passing in the blackness of a Texas night. The next image is of a silent train barreling through the darkness parallel to a truck cruising down the highway.

A voice speaks.

"I've always felt I've been endowed with the power to seriously change the world. It's not even that I have an idea of what I want to change it to. It's just this feeling of not living up to the potential that was given to me.”

Chad Holt, the driver of the truck and the total badass in question, hoists a beer to acknowledge the train's suddenly audible howling and toast his own words.

He continues his soliloquy.

"I honestly feel like I can do it," Holt says. "I honestly feel like I got what it takes."

What follows is a quick interview with Holt’s mother and father, about Holt’s untapped potential, then Holt at a guinea-pig judging contest, where he captures first place and celebrates with a expletive.

Next, the reasoning for his guinea-pig raising.

"I took a year off to raise guinea pigs with my girlfriend. And do cocaine," Holt says. It's unsure what Holt took a year off from to focus on guinea pigs. Not drugs.

Then the opening credits roll. Total Badass. A documentary by Bob Ray. About the life and times of Chad Holt.

"The movie could just be that he's so crazy and badass that you could make a movie about him," Holt tells the camera. "Nobody knows what it's like to be me, Bob."

With Total Badass, Ray offers a 91-minute introduction to what it is like to be Holt, described as a "wild man-about-town, social deviant, musical/stunt performer, notorious sex fiend, guinea-pig enthusiast, writer/publisher, father, weed-dealing felon, hip-hop impresario, trash-can jumper and local maniac." The 2010 film is also a journey into the underground music and arts scene of Austin, a hipper-than-hip city where the weird are a little weirder than the weird elsewhere. And Holt is one of the weirdest of them all.

Living in a friend's garage; estranged from his girlfriend of five years, the documentary follows Holt as he cleans grease from restaurant ventilation hoods in the dead of night, sells weed to keep his alternative weekly afloat, writes, gets high, survives as a single parent, lives as a felon on probation, raises guinea pigs and performs with his stunt rock band (combining humor and violence, "lunacy with insanity" and music). Nine and a half minutes into Total Badass, a night-vision lit Holt ungracefully dives headfirst into a garbage can. What follows is a montage of Holt leaping, plunging and derriere-flopping into a series of garbage cans, while Holt offers a voice-over challenging critics not to call it art.

The documentary is a wild, unique ride, deep into the Austin counterculture, with Holt serving as tour guide. Independent filmmaker Bob Ray, the head and founder of Austin-based production company CrashCam Films, is just along for the offbeat ride with his thunderbolt of a documentary.

Earlier this fall, Holt and Ray hit the road together, screening Total Badass and Hell on Wheels, Ray and partner Werner Campbell's 2007 documentary about the modern-era roller derby in Texas. Five years in the making, the 90-minute Hell on Wheels follows a group of Texas women who in 2001 resurrect the once-popular sport before splintering, with the two leagues forming from the clash — Lonestar Rollergirls and the Texas Rollergirls — leading to a national roller derby revival.

The Down & Dirty Austin Film Tour is guerilla movie-marketing at its best, with Ray bypassing distributors and taking his documentaries straight to the audience. The tour's blog includes a Day Nine entry in Raleigh, N.C., with Ray noting that "driving around with a small mound of weed and a pile of illegally obtained prescription drugs will give you the fear. Luckily, we have this cloaking device known as a Prius. No one expects to find a pair of deviants in a Prius, right?"

Probably not. But no one would expect to discover a heart in the messy existence of Holt’s life either. But that's what Total Badass delivers. Sure, it's upsetting at times. Viewers might wish to reach into the screen and slap Holt into reality. But it's entertaining and shockingly funny, and undeniably touching as Holt attempts to prove he matters and get his affairs in order.

Or not.

“I’m a total badass," Holt says in the documentary. "That’s what the film is about.”

See the films:

Both Hell on Wheels and Total Badass will be screened at Market Street Cinema on Wednesday with Hell on Wheels showing at 7 p.m., and Total Badass screening at 9:30 p.m. Filmmaker Bob Ray and Total Badass subject Chad Holt will be present for the screenings.