Author and radio personality Garrison Keillor is the subject of Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio with the Red Tennis Shoes, scheduled for screening tomorrow as part of the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

AP / HENNY RAY ABRAMS

You may know Garrison Keillor’s voice from his many appearances over the years on National Public Radio’s A Prairie Home Companion, a folksy mix of light humor, Will Rogers’ style common sense and the kind of music you don’t hear almost anywhere anymore.

Over the years for the show, Keillor has created a raft of offbeat characters from his fictional small town of Lake Wobegone, Minn., that are so real even Keillor himself now says the town “was fictional, but now I’m not so sure.”

Documentary filmmaker Peter Rosen followed Keillor around for several months during 2005, from his Minnesota home to his New York City apartment to local rhubarb festivals and personal appearances in the rain to uncover the man behind the radio myth in Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio with the Red Tennis Shoes, which will be screened tomorrow as part of the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

Rosen’s film is as entertaining, low key and folksy as Keillor himself who, although no doubt a multi-millionaire by now, exudes the easygoing down-home charm of someone you might meet at the church picnic. In fact, Keillor revels in attending church picnics and rhubarb festivals, as well as enjoying the vibrancy of Manhattan where he first came in the 1960s in hopes of becoming a writer at The New Yorker magazine. Near the end of the film, Keillor says that, “We live in Minnesota for family and for business and we live in New York for peace and quiet and for the stimulation.”

That’s about as deep into Keillor’s character as the film gets. Most of the time one has the feeling that either he is “on” all the time playing the Garrison Keillor that people have come to expect or that he really has become his own radio character. Either way, he’s a delight as he relishes the idea that he has gotten people to “halfway believe “ his outlandish stories about himself and his life growing up in Lake Wobegone.

Keillor is occasionally seen on stage during A Prairie Home Companion or with cast members in a backstage look at how the program is put together. Other times, he’s at his typewriter, musing over some new outlandish tale that he will spin on the radio or giving hints as to how he works to come up with the characters and situations in the first place. When he travels out to the public, he’s obviously looking for inspiration, saying that he’s looking “to capture the happy mood of the people” in his writing. He sees America as a place where kindness is alive and well. It may not be a place that really exists, but clearly Keillor and most of us would like it to be so, which is part of his attraction.

“Writing is an act of discovery,” Keillor tells a group of students in a small gathering on a visit to Savannah, Ga. Rosen’s film is a chance to discover a little bit about the man himself.

Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio with the Red Tennis Shoes will be screened at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence, as part of the 12th Rhode Island International Film Festival. Tickets are $10 at the door. For a complete schedule go to rifilmfest.org.

****Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio with the Red Tennis Shoes

Starring: Garrison Keillor, Meryl Streep.

Rated: Not rated, contains nothing offensive.