Mulholland Drive. Written and directed by David Lynch. With Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux, Ann Miller, Dan Hedaya, and Robert Forster. A Universal Pictures release. At the Showcase (Warwick and Seekonk Route 6 only).

As the world sinks into its collective bad dream, how nice to have David Lynch's personal nightmares as a distraction. Those who feared that Lynch might have submitted permanently to the better demons of his nature with the G-rated The Straight Story (though under the surface far from straight or G-rated) a couple years ago need fret no more. Based on the pilot for a Twin Peaks-style TV series rejected by ABC in 1999, Mulholland Drive is right up the vintage Lynch alley, his most bizarre, hilarious, and tragic film since Blue Velvet.

Like his 1986 masterpiece, Drive starts with the corny and conventional and quickly demonstrates that so-called norms merely mask the most profound doubts, terrors, and perversities. It's night, headlights illumine a street sign for Mulholland Drive, and a thug holds a gun on a beautiful woman (Laura Harring) in a limo. A car full of teenagers plows into them, and the woman, dazed and amnesiac, wanders down the cliffs to Hollywood below in a sequence that's like a parody of a '40s film noir. Gilda, say: a poster for the movie hangs in the room the woman finds herself in, and she takes her new first name from Rita Hayworth (who played the title character).

The woman she encounters in that room seems a relic from another film genre. Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) is fresh off the plane from Deep Water, Ontario, and aglow with her dream of stardom. Her aunt, an actress herself, has let her stay in her apartment, but before Betty can set off on her first audition, she's confronted with the enigma of Rita's past and identity, a mystery complicated by a bag full of money and an ornate blue key. With Rita being a fusion of the Kyle MacLachlan and Isabella Rossellini roles in Blue Velvet, Betty, like Laura Dern's character in that film, sets off to solve a mystery that soon takes some Sapphic and solipsistic U-turns.

Betty's not the only who's got her detective work cut out for her. Although not as bluntly cryptic as Lost Highway, Drive takes some jolting narrative bumps in the road. The two men at Winkies, for example, one of whom discusses a recurrent dream he's been having that takes place at the very same Winkies and ends with a fatal revelation. Or the black-comic grotesquely botched mob hit and theft of a book that is "the history of the world in phone numbers." Or the story of Adam Kersher (Justin Theroux), the hotshot Hollywood director whose latest film is being hijacked by mafiosos even as his wife takes a toss in the hay with the pool man.

No doubt these are traces of plot lines and dead ends the television series might have explored, but even in this two-and-a-half-hour crystallization they coalesce into a dazzling whole. As with other current oneiric films -- Memento, The Others, Richard Linklater's upcoming Waking Life, -- part of the suspense and mystery revolves around basic questions like "Who's awake?", or for that matter "Who's alive?" It's not so much a "Whodunit?" as a "Who's dreaming it?"

You might say, who needs it? If nothing else, Mulholland Drive offers good clean fun for those who like to piece together a bracing hermeneutic puzzle. If there is a dreamer behind it all, of course it's Lynch himself, and one criticism of Drive might be that it's just the filmmaker up to his old tricks again, offering a happy hunting ground of endless speculation for his fans. But you could have a worse time than going through Lynch's oeuvre and, say, comparing Drive's blue box to the severed ear in Blue Velvet, or the scene in which Betty "calls herself up" to the one in which Robert Blake invites Bill Pullman to do the same in Lost Highway. Probably the richest source of allusions is the much despised Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which actually begins to make sense in retrospect (the "blue rose case" described in mime by "my mother's sister's girl" at that film's beginning seems to offer significant clues).

Okay, so it's not Citizen Kane. What saves Drive from being just a cinematic Rubik's Cube, however, are the epiphanic moments of astonishing beauty and inexplicable emotion. Thank newcomer Naomi Watts for much of that. She takes her aw-shucks ingenue Betty into the stratosphere in an audition scene where she almost scorches the pants off Chad Everett. Later, her response to a chilling Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison's "Crying" captures all the horror of immutable loss and eternal damnation, as does a scene of futile self-abuse. Mulholland Drive might be Lynchian mental masturbation, but it beats almost every other film now out there in its passion and vision.

Issue Date: October 19 - 25, 2001