This article was originally published on Sept. 10 from Toronto International Film Festival, where the movie was unveiled. The film's New York premiere was abruptly canceled on Thursday morning, as was Louis C.K.'s appearance on 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.'

Allow me to run through the basic premise of Louis C.K.'s new movie, I Love You, Daddy, which he self-funded and filmed in secret in June.

As he does, C.K. plays a version of himself, this time embodying Glen Topher, a wildly successful TV writer with a massive New York pad, a crazy ex-wife (naturally) and a manipulative daughter, China (Chloë Grace Moretz). China is 17. This is important.

At a celeb-filled party thrown by an actress (Rose Byrne) he wants to sleep with cast, Glen happens upon his idol (John Malkovich). The legendary filmmaker isn't impressed by Glen, but quickly becomes enamored with China, who is nauseated by his reputation for sleeping with children.

Don't believe everything you hear about people, Glen tells his daughter, echoing C.K.'s own ongoing PR problems involving rumors of sexual harassment against female comics. ("Well, you can’t touch stuff like that," the comedian told Vulture last year. "If you need your public profile to be all positive, you’re sick in the head.") I was still on board at this point, curious what kind of twisted score-settling tale C.K. had cooked up.

Then the older, goateed filmmaker begins to court Glen's spoiled high-school senior, fetishizing her as she tries on skimpy outfits at Barneys, inviting her to Paris.

Glen is frozen and flummoxed. With his ex out of the picture, what should he do? As the audience laughed around me, my stomach began to roil.

What he doesn't do is shut down a budding romance between his underage daughter and a 68-year-old man. Instead, C.K. gives Byrne a speech passionately defending a relationship that could amount to statutory rape.

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Following the movie's screening at Toronto Film Festival in September, the cast took the stage.

C.K. summed up how the idea originated. "Vernon Chatman, who wrote it with me, we were just talking about (this) fascination with people that there are stories about and stuff, people you love, in their work. Then it just sort of came up like, 'Oh, what if one of them was (expletive) my daughter?' " The audience laughed, eating it up.

What would happen? The answer in I Love You, Daddy is nothing.

As Glen sat helpless while his daughter left his house, again and again, to spend her time with a man her grandfather's age, I shook watching this movie, which cavalierly auctioned off a minor (the age of consent is 16 to 18, depending upon the state), selling laughs off abdication of the lowest possible threshold of parental obligation.

And there's not a consequence in sight. Nor a question, it seems.

"I don't know that we had a conversation about necessarily why he wanted to do it. But it's not the kind of thing I would ask," Malkovich said onstage, as the audience applauded.

The (mostly positive) Woody Allen comparisons came quickly, which the comic addressed the next day.

"Woody is an ingredient along with a whole other generation of dudes who used to go up and down the age line a lot more easily," C.K. toldThe Hollywood Reporter in Toronto. "I grew up with that." 1979's Manhattan, about the relationship between a teenage girl and a significantly older man, "is a movie I saw as a kid, and I was like, ‘OK, that’s what people do.’ "

A large number of reviews gave C.K. a free pass. Here's mine: I Love You, Daddy was shot beautifully in black and white and Edie Falco is marvelous as Glen's beleaguered producing partner.

C.K.'s fans will likely come after me, tell me I don't have a sense of humor and/or don't understand his comedy. I like much of Louis C.K.'s work. But he didn't have to make his onscreen daughter underage to prove his point.

What was the point of I Love You, Daddy, again?

The Orchard, which purchased C.K.'s film for $5 million, plans to release I Love You, Daddy on Nov. 17.