Donald Glover has revived his musical alter ego Childish Gambino and will hit the road for a world tour that includes an Oct. 2 stop at St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center.

Tickets for the show, which will serve as Glover’s local debut as an arena headliner, go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday through Ticketmaster. Fans can sign up for early access to tickets at thenewworldtour.com. American Express cardholders also have a preorder option that begins at 10 a.m. Wednesday. Neither the promoter nor the venue announced prices.

Glover, 40, grew up in Georgia and was voted “Most Likely to Write for ‘The Simpsons’ ” in his high school yearbook. He began rapping and creating electronic music while studying dramatic writing at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

In 2006, Tina Fey hired Glover as a writer on her sitcom “30 Rock.” He held that position until 2009, when he took a starring role in the sitcom “Community.” At that time, he also began releasing music as Childish Gambino, a name he took from a Wu-Tang Clan name generator.

Glover spent much of the ’10s focused on music, releasing three albums and a series of gold and platinum singles, including “Heartbeat,” “3005,” “Redbone” and “This Is America,” which topped the charts in a dozen countries.

He also created the widely acclaimed show “Atlanta,” which ran for four seasons on FX, and starred in the films “Magic Mike XXL,” “The Martian,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and “Solo: A Star Wars Story.”

In 2017, Glover first suggested he was retiring his musical stage name. But he toured again in 2018 and played festivals in 2019. He released his fourth album, “3.15.20.,” on the same day as its title. On Monday, he issued a revised version of the record, now named “Atavista,” along with a new video for the song “Little Foot Big Foot”:

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Like the couple it’s about, “Slow” acknowledges and, to some degree, gives in to expectations set by a world overloaded with conformist-minded romcoms and conventional relationship blueprints. But it’s worth seeing. And for a weeklong run starting Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago audiences can see for themselves.

Simple, efficient set-up here, in Lithuanian writer-director Marija Kavtaradze’s second feature. We meet Elena in her natural element, in a dance studio, working out some new contemporary choreography. A man arrives and introduces himself as Dovydas, a sign language interpreter. He’s bringing a group of deaf adolescent students to the studio where Elena develops a dance piece with them, communicating non-verbally, as choreographer and performer, and through Dovydas’ signing.

There’s a warmth and something of a spark between the two adults. They share a performer’s expressivity in their respective mediums. “Slow” returns periodically to scenes of Dovydas alone, on camera, providing eloquent sign language translation for pop song lyrics; throughout the film, Elena rehearses in the studio with two fellow dancers, as they prepare a piece for full production.

Soon enough, after a few walk-and-talks, they’re in Elena’s bedroom, on the brink of a next step. That step in “Slow” turns out to be two words that reset Elena’s expectations. “I’m asexual,” Dovydas says. Not attracted to anyone, really, he adds. “Never was.” The end? Hardly; the friendship already underway has created a closeness that feels right. “Slow” is about how that feeling leads to a relationship frontier new to Elena, and rewarding and challenging and frustrating and fraught to both parties.

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At its best, “Slow” pays intimate attention to the way these two deal, humanely, sometimes testily, with their circumstances. Shooting on mellow 16-millimeter film, director Kavtaradze does very well by both key performers. Greta Grineviciute gives Elena an easygoing combination of solidity and freedom, while Kestutis Cicenas lends Dovydas the affable, somewhat guarded air of a man in limbo. A comfortable grey area?

The script has its on-the-nose impulses. A visit with Elena’s ice-cold, fat-shaming mother explains it all for us, too bluntly. And while the actors work with real skill and ease together, “Slow” tends to establish and re-establish the characters’ connection in familiar ways, with lots of tense conversational silence followed by mutual peals of laughter.

When the scenes work, however, they really work, and the conversation feels like some things are being said, straightforwardly and without ambiguity (you know, like they talk in the movies) while other things are not. “Slow” goes only so far into Dovydas’s self-proclaimed state of sexual being, while complicating it along the narrative path. I took the film not as any sort of design for living, or facile explanation of anything, but as a design for communicating — honestly, humanely, painfully, sometimes — for the good of whatever relationships yours happen to be.

“Slow” — 3 stars (out of 4)

No MPA rating (sexual content, some language)

Running time: 1:48

How to watch: May 10-16 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; siskelfilmcenter.org. In Lithuanian and English with English subtitles.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.