I’m not sure when, exactly, Olivier Assayas became an eccentric – I didn’t catch any warning signs in Late August, Early September; then again, I was a bit discomfited by Irma Vep, which was as much an essay on the filmmaking industry as it was (or was not, quite) a compelling narrative. With 2002's Demonlover, a weirdly moralistic screed involving global corporate intrigue, sexually explicit anime and Internet porn, he veered into reactionary territory, dramatizing the dehumanizing, exploitative power of the Web in much the same way David Cronenberg once made a scary monster out of cable television in Videodrome.

In that context, and on paper, Clean seems like a settling down. Assayas once again winds his narrative down to human scale and returns to the artistic compatriate he found once upon a time in erstwhile lover (and erstwhile wife) Maggie Cheung. She plays Emily, wife of a rock star named Lee Hauser, who’s tangled up in drugs and struggling to reinvent a flagging career. When Lee winds up dead of a motel-room drug overdose, Emily joins the inspired-by-the-true-story tradition of superstar spouses who struggle to recover their balance outside the single-degree-of-separation spotlight glare that both illuminates and casts shadows across their own lives.

As personal as the story is, and as quietly intense as Cheung’s performance is, Clean is punctuated with weird fillips and indulgences. Released after being jailed on drug charges, Emily knows that if she wants to regain custody of her son, she will have to prove herself to her gruff father-in-law, Albrecht (Nick Nolte). To do that, she tries to enlist the help of Tricky (!), who drops into the show, playing himself, as a massive sort of non sequitur. It’s explained, in dialogue, that he’s an old friend of Lee Hauser’s who’s gained Albrecht’s trust by honoring Lee’s memory, and therefore somebody Cheung hopes will vouch for her with Albrecht – but it doesn’t wash. It feels like an elaborate excuse walk-on cameo by a star Assayas admires. At the same time, there’s something chilly and beautiful in the way Tricky rebuffs Cheung’s repeated attempts to enlist his help with an emphatically silent shake of the head. He’s like The Godfather declining to help you out of a tough spot, or the banker denying your loan application. And then he disappears from the narrative.

As out-from-under-addiction stories go, Clean goes down easy. Emily's struggle with addiction is discussed more in exposition than it is demonstrated in performance — though there's something just right about the scene that shows her working, pathetically, as a server at a Chinese restaurant. (It might not be rock-bottom, but seeing the beautiful, ordinarily so self-possessed Maggie Cheung waitressing inspires a certain level of cognitive dissonance.) The gist of the whole piece seems to be that she will redeem herself only by creating something to call her own, therefore crawling out from underneath both her jones and her husband’s reputation and ensuring that she’ll be able, psychologically, to make some kind of life together with her son. And Cheung’s singing, in an emotionally charged scene where she takes those first steps toward happiness, is — well, her English-language vocals are competent, but rather idiosyncratic. And that performance inspires contradictory feelings at a crucial emotional nexus for the film, which starts to feel less “character study” and more “Maggie Cheung vehicle.”
.
Then again, Nico and Yoko Ono had unusual voices that both grated on lots of nerves, and they both became pop icons of a high order in the U.S. music industry, so maybe Emily does have a shot at the big time. The good news is that Cheung’s performance in the film is, perhaps uncharacteristically, understated and inviting. She holds the screen together even as the threadbare narrative diffuses. Nolte makes a gentle and wise surrogate father figure — it’s fascinating to watch the pas de deux between the two of them, as Emily tries to win Albrecht’s confidence and Albrecht considers quietly how much of it he’s willing to yield (and how much of it he must give away). And Assayas still has a way with the handheld camera that’s damned near preternatural — rich in color and texture, with the occasional revelatory touch that makes so many sins forgiven. There are visuals here, wrangled by ace cinematographer Eric Gautier, like a shot of a car parked overlooking a field of industrial smokestacks, that have an eloquence and power that only become more apparent in hindsight. The cutting, by Luc Barnier, is seamless, working the film across the cuts like a nimble-fingered massage over your pleasure centers. Whatever else it may do, Clean never bores.

Bottom line, Assayas remains a sensitive director whose persistent involvement with deeply troubled characters and evocative imagery is admirable and, in some ways, unrivaled. He’s one of the best we have. It’s just that Clean plays like the work of a great auteur working in sandbox mode — the casting of Cheung, Nolte, and Béatrice Dalle in the same film is sort of the arthouse equivalent of a fantasy football draft, with cameos by Tricky and Mazzy Star founder David Roback adding rock-star gloss — to build a world that has too much of the whiff of hipster fabulism about it to play at gut level.