I'm not sure David Lynch and I live on the same planet. When I heard Lynch's new movie, his first since 1992's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, was to be titled Lost Highway, I assumed it was a reference to the famous Hank Williams hit of the same name. Silly me. It turns out that Lynch came across the phrase while reading a noirish novel by Barry Gifford, who wrote the book that became Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990).

Fair enough, I suppose. The song describes the "Lost Highway" as the road you ramble down when you're tempted by sin. By contrast, Lynch's Lost Highway is a veritable catalog of sins. And while Hank William's road is a desolate and singleminded strip of pavement, Lynch's is a Moebius strip of yellow-lined asphalt that hosts any number of oddball travelers. Maybe they're the same place after all, but Lynch's version isn't nearly as poignant, and you don't feel so sorry for the folks who wind up there.

Lost Highway is insistently obscure, inviting speculation at every turn. It defies conventional notions of story, character and narrative, and takes great pleasure in subverting exactly those notions. I'm not saying Lost Highway is a great film -- in fact, it's a middling accomplishment that might have approached greatness if Lynch had the courage to jettison his more inscrutable digressions and trim the damn thing to about 90 minutes or so. Lost Highway is Lynch at his most expansive, but also his most indulgent. Speculating on its mysteries is fascinating, but actually slogging through the picture may bore you silly.

There are two different stories. In the first, Bill Pullman is Fred Madison, an avant garde jazz saxophonist (I'm not making this up) who's married to the vampish Renee (Patricia Arquette with dark hair). The time when these two were happy together has long since passed. They barely speak, and the silence between words seems infested with disease. The snail's pace is meant to evoke, I suppose, an unspecified dread. Fred suspects Renee of infidelity. She lies to him about how she spends her time when he's performing. We get moody close-ups of lips and eyes, and droning noises concocted by Trent Reznor (better known as Nine Inch Nails). We get otherwordly art design, experimental camera tricks, and a movie frame that drips shadow.

The malaise of their private little world is penetrated when somebody delivers an unlabeled videotape alongside the morning edition of the Los Angeles Times. Fred and Renee watch the video, a snippet of camcorder footage panning across the outside of their house. The next day brings a new tape. This time, the footage is of the inside of the house, where someone apparently taped the couple in bed, sleeping. Another day, another tape -- this one shows Fred killing his wife, finally fulfilling the dour, nonspecific premonitions of the movie's opening scenes and eventually turning the narrative on its head. In his cell on death row, Fred is transformed into Pete Dayton, a young auto mechanic. Released from prison, Pete starts fooling around with Alice Wakefield (Patricia Arquette with blonde hair). Blue Velvet's Frank Booth is reincarnated here as Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), Alice's violent and jealous boyfriend. Richard Pryor, Henry Rollins, Marilyn Manson, and the late Jack (Eraserhead) Nance all have cameos, for better and for worse.

The narrative, such as it is, is circular -- a construction that was probably used to creepiest effect in the horror anthology film Dead of Night (1945), but which has come back into vogue recently with the success of Pulp Fiction (1994) and Twelve Monkeys. Meanwhile, Lynch takes cues from the surrealists -- one actress plays two different characters, and it's possible that one character is played by two different actors. It depends on what exactly you mean by "character," because identity is one of the film's concerns. Meanwhile, Richard Blake looms as a grinning, wide-eyed weirdo known in the credits as "Mystery Man" who may or may not be endowed with supernatural powers, and who may or may not be lord over Lost Highway's strange goings-on.

Just about the only conclusion I feel comfortable drawing is that this movie is a sort of wish-fulfillment nightmare, happening to some great extent in Fred Madison's head. But even that doesn't wash completely. Lynch and co-writer Gifford have dropped clues that the movie is partly about Fred's interior reinvention of himself as a different person, but what then are we to make of the circular structure that inverts the movie's dream state back onto its nominal reality? (I'm thinking specifically of a message received by intercom at the beginning of the picture, and of the changing content of a particular photograph.) And if the entire movie represents some sort of dream state, it becomes impossible to distinguish which events, if any, are "real" and which are projections of the mind -- the obvious forebears of these sorts of narrative games are Akira Kurosawa's splendid Rashomon (1950) and Alain Resnais' lush Last Year at Marienbad (1961).

So if Lost Highway is a game of sorts, the onus falls on Lynch to draw us into the puzzle. It's here where he stumbles and falls. The story isn't compelling because Lynch and Gifford haven't bothered to create any real characters. Lost Highway is a little like Blue Velvet might have been without the anchoring presence of Jeffrey Beaumont, or like Twin Peaks without the facade of normalcy represented by smalltown America and imposed by television censorship. Given room to move, Lynch certainly goes nuts. While Blue Velvet seemed to be about America's fetishization of sex and violence, the far more explicit Lost Highway seems to be predicated on fetish, including showcase scenes of violence and nudity.

The violence in Lost Highway is reflexive, "postmodern," as pleased with itself as the snippets of carnage in a James Cameron movie. Watching the camcordered scene of Renee's murder, we glimpse a bloody, dismembered corpse in quick, ecstatic cuts through the parallel blue video haze. In another showpiece moment, somebody's face is impaled on a piece of furniture when the film's carefully tended set decoration turns lethal. We see the aftermath from at least three different angles as the movie lingers on its own handiwork, trolling for gasps and giggles.

If this hypersensory approach to violence dates back at least to Blue Velvet, Lynch's approach to sex seems to have regressed. While the disturbing encounters between Kyle Maclachlan and Isabella Rosellini seemed truly life-changing, the characters in Lost Highway barely seem to have sex -- or lives -- at all. Although we see the requisite shots of one body moving on top of another, the only true erotic charge in the whole film comes when Patrica Arquette takes off her clothes, a gun leveled at her head. Later, we'll see a 16mm porno loop projected onto a big screen in monochrome, a fictional fetish framed by the larger fetish that is Lost Highway itself. I'm as pleased as anyone to see Arquette naked, but nudity here -- as in the previous Fire Walk With Me, which put Sheryl Lee on similar display -- is so mannered and portentous, so self-consciously un-self-conscious, that the scenes in question threaten to detach themselves from the rest of the film, spinning into the same cinematic void that swallows up Fred Madison.

Now, it is interesting to me that in this age of Showgirls and The Red Shoe Diaries, Lynch can actually make me feel embarrassed to look at a naked woman onscreen. And I do entertain the possibility that in causing me discomfort he's also showing me something about the way men -- or, by extension, film audiences -- view female sexuality. What worries me is that he may be showing only something about the way he views female sexuality. Lynch's ever-more-phantasmal representations of woman had already become tiresome by the time Laura Palmer/Glinda the Good Witch showed up at the end of Wild At Heart.

None of the performances are particularly strong, except Blake's, which is tremendous. Characters here -- and, accordingly, performers -- are subjugated to Lynch's audiovisual agenda, which more or less ignores issues of motivation, development, or relationships. David Cronenberg has said that he wants his films to function as though a hole has been drilled in a viewer's head, allowing a dream to be projected onto a movie screen, but Lynch probably comes closer to reaching that goal. It's exactly his repudiation of "storytelling" that makes parts of Lost Highway so effective, and so defiant of conventional criticism.

Indeed, Lost Highway has flashes of greatness, including its clever indulgence in unassailable antilogic and showstopping cinematography. The final shots, depicting a maddening, transformative, and inexplicable ride down that highway, come startlingly close to redefining our rather tired perceptions of film noir at the end of the millenium. But the bold imagery and admittedly impressive formalist manipulation of narrative only go so far. Trouble is, in Lost Highway, Lynch goes out on a limb to expore brutality and perversion, and delivers little more than a gross-out and a hard-on. That said, I'll be hoping his next picture puts those two elements to better use.