For many movies shown at the Atlanta Film Festival, the chance to be seen by an audience and film industry professionals is its own reward. Getting formal honors is merely the cherry on top, and the Festival reveals which cherries get picked June 8 at 6 p.m. Held at the High Museum's Hill Auditorium, the closing ceremony will bestow the festival's Southeastern Media Award, the Audience Award, and the jury prizes for the best films in the Animated, Documentary, Experimental, Narrative and Student categories. The closing night gala follows with a screening of Lovely & Amazing, a comedy about three neurotic sisters and their mother starring Catherine Keener and Brenda Blethyn, at 8 p.m. at the Rich Auditorium.

In the running for the Best Documentary Prize is My Father The Genius (June 5 at 12:30 p.m., Regal Hollywood 24), director Lucia Small's fascinating, warts-and-all portrait of her father, architect Glen Howard Small. The title contains a bit of irony; Glen doesn't doubt his own architectural genius, but Lucia wonders how a brilliant man can have such stunted interpersonal skills.

Glen's greatest claim to fame was conceiving a utopian city called the Biomorphic Biosphere (which isn't a sphere at all, but resembles several suspension bridges draped in mosquito nets). Despite his advanced ideas and popularity as a teacher, his outspoken manner has alienated him from the architecture establishment. The film finds him bitterly complaining about being forced to labor in obscurity, building houses for yuppies who don't appreciate his ideas.

Lucia may not be a genius, but she certainly has narrative flair, effectively using Terry Gilliam-esque animation, interviews and remarkable old footage, such as shots of her father as a kind of hippie Pied Piper and family vacation movies that have no people in them, just buildings and landscapes. Glen makes a garrulous film subject; he's disturbingly candid with his daughter about sexuality and acknowledges that he was a bad dad. But even as his career spirals downward, the father-daughter bond starts looking up.

Not up for award consideration but still worth a look is Tribute (June 7 at 10 p.m., Regal Hollywood 24), a light-hearted, poker-faced documentary about musicians dedicated to imitating other musicians. It mostly chronicles the behind-the-scenes efforts of Larger Than Life, a KISS tribute band, as members put on costumes, go to gigs and audition new members. In the end, though, it makes you wonder if there's any real difference between Gene Simmons performing in makeup and someone in the same makeup performing as Gene Simmons.

Directors Kris Curry and Rich Fox find plenty of material funny enough to be fiction, as when they intercut between two rival Monkees tribute bands, each rehearsing "Last Train to Clarksville."

But Tribute's perspective ultimately seems restricted to a handful of tribute bands and their day jobs. It also spends more time than necessary with a pair of fans, a middle-aged headbanger called "Heavy Metal Mailman" and a frighteningly committed Queen admirer nicknamed "Superfan," who becomes hilariously distraught when Sheer Heart Attack's lead singer quits the group to perform in a German production of Cats. You can't help but wonder what the originals think of their carbon copies, but Tribute interviews none of them. An interesting side note: Steven Soderbergh is executive director.

Playing in a cover band would be the height of fame to the principals in the documentary Standing By Yourself (June 7 at 2:30 p.m., Regal Hollywood 24), which depicts three delinquent teenage boys killing time in upstate New York. Director Josh Khoury's shaky, off-kilter camera offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective as it watches the boys bitch about shopping mall security guards, nag their long-suffering mothers for money, get wasted and throw up.

Bespectacled Adam (younger brother of the filmmaker) comes across as the "smart" one, in the sense that Moe is the "smartest" of the Three Stooges. Articulate and self-aware, he's still prone to chugging Robutussin and chasing it with apple juice. Brandon strikes us as a mild-mannered tag-along, but he drops out of the picture when he gets a girlfriend (suggesting he's smarter than he looks).

The most disturbing of the three is Siegfried, who's quick to anger and affects a spiky purple mohawk. He recites a racist anthem by heart and recounts the grisly death threat that got him expelled from high school, but we're never sure how much he means the vicious things he says. It might be that Standing By Yourself's subjects are showing off for Khoury's camera, but for the most part they seem depressingly true to life, and an air of futility increasingly hangs over Siegfried.

Standing By Yourself doesn't offer its young antiheroes any easy ways out in its hour-long running time. But as subjects of their own documentary, the restless youth become temporary movie stars.

The Atlanta Film Festival continues through June 8 at the Regal Hollywood 24 Cinemas and other area theaters. $7.50 ($6 for IMAGE members). 404-352-4225. www.imagefv.org.