VANILLA SKY. Directed by Cameron Crowe. Written by Cameron Crowe based on the film Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos), by Alejandro Amenábar. With Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Jason Lee, Kurt Russell, Noah Taylor, and Tilda Swinton. A Paramount Pictures release. At the Apple Valley, Entertainment, Flagship, Hoyts Providence 16, Opera House, Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.

In a sense, there are only two important directors in Hollywood right now, filmmakers who can command big budgets and big stars and also have serious ambitions to cinema that's original, artful, and lasting. Steven Soderbergh cashed in his Oscar (Traffic, Erin Brockovich) laurels from last year to make the infinitely commercial and inconsequential marzipan of Ocean's Eleven. I don't see him making something like The Limey again soon, let alone Schizopolis. Then there's Cameron Crowe. His Almost Famous didn't convince me. His Vanilla Sky, a remake of Alejandro Amenábar's Spanish headscratcher Open Your Eyes, does.

To begin with, it says more about pop music in one line of dialogue than does most of Crowe's Creem-puff autobiographical tour of the '70s. "So that's what rock-and-roll music has become: a broken guitar in a glass case on a rich man's wall," quips Sofia (Penélope Cruz). She's commenting on an item in the collection of playboy David Aames (Tom Cruise), which also includes canvases by Joni Mitchell and Monet (the latter featuring the "vanilla sky" that was the favorite of his deceased mother) and a hologram of John Coltrane.

That used to be the way David preferred his experience: contained, controlled, and if necessary disposable. Vain, beautiful, rich, and spoiled, he's the scion of a publishing empire, a descendant perhaps of Charles Foster Kane (his nickname among the company's board members is "Citizen Dildo"). But Sofia's words, or perhaps her smile, come as a wake-up call. Will he shake off his life of empty hedonism and idle possessions? Is she the girl of his dreams?

There are complications. Sofia is actually the date of David's best friend, Brian (Jason Lee); he brought her to David's birthday party and David just assumed she was another present. Then there's Julia (Cameron Diaz), the girl from the night before, who can't understand that she and David won't be together forever. Finally, there's David's own moral inertia, so he gets into Julia's car for one last fling . . .

A nightmare of suicide, disfigurement, betrayal, murder, and abject paranoia follows, much the same as in Amenábar's original, but augmented here not so much by Crowe's oneiric imagery, stellar cast, and the best soundtrack of the year as by his sardonic omniscience about the seductions of simulated existence. Like Cruise himself, David is a beleaguered icon. He self-destructs and must fashion a new image, whether literally via a team of plastic surgeons who offer him an "æsthetic regenerative shield" (i.e., a mask), psychically by means of a shrink (Kurt Russell) who's trying to uncover the truth about his guilt or innocence regarding a confusing crime, or pop-culturally by means of Crowe's diabolically crafted webwork of references and allusions.

Some of the success of Vanilla Sky depends on a willing suspension of disbelief -- I mean, would you trade Cameron Diaz for Penélope Cruz? Yet Cruz as Sofia does demonstrate a sly irony that's new in her English-speaking performances: when she assesses Julia as "the saddest girl ever to hold a martini," the advantage begins to tilt a bit in Sofia's favor. She's given ample support from Cruise, who reaches back for the kind of subversive energy he demonstrated in Born on the Fourth of July and Interview with a Vampire. He's certainly opened up a lot since his pairing with Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut. And therein lie the film's greatest virtues: it is, indeed, a love story. Self-love, perhaps, love in which the names and faces get a little mixed up, too, but love nevertheless, as intense, absurd, and tragic as it comes. A shot of Sofia walking away in Central Park, heartbreaking and hallucinatory, might be the saddest image in the film, martini or not.

But cryogenics as deus ex machina? It works for Crowe only slightly better than in Amenábar's version. It's kind of like the nuclear plot device Soderbergh resorts to in Ocean's Eleven, except there the implausibility is just part of the self-conscious irrelevance of it all. Here, the sky is the limit, with an open-ended framing device that ranges from the crass to the cosmic. "Immortality as entertainment?" asks a character in a moment of revelation. In Vanilla Sky, we get equal helpings of both.