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Aimless, unfunny 'Art School Confidential' makes no A's

Jerome Platz is too hot to be so breathtakingly dull. With raven bedroom eyes, brows like two storm clouds and rosebud lips of alarming plumpness, Jerome (Max Minghella) is a Calvin Klein ad that moves, the embodiment of vacant beauty whose expression of confused yearning tells us he has something to say if he weren't so shy, so achingly sensitive.

Sony Pictures Classics 'Art School Confidential' 2 out of 5 stars The verdict: Satire needs a fresh coat of paint. Director: Terry Zwigoff Starring: Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent, Matt Keeslar Run time: 102 minutes Release date: May 5, 2006 Rating: R for language including sexual references, nudity and a scene of violence. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Minghella's Jerome is the mopey protagonist of "Art School Confidential," a multihyphenated satire-romance-murder mystery that finds traction on none of these fronts. It wanders, arms outstretched, bumping into things, before dropping with a huffy sigh of resignation. Yet more than its underdeveloped protagonist and aimless poking about for purpose, this low-budget comedy with hipster credentials is curdlingly unfunny. I laughed not once.

That's what happens when you're glib instead of piercing. Director Terry Zwigoff, who won street cred with "Crumb," "Ghost World" and the mistakenly praised "Bad Santa," takes satiric aim at the pretension and petty politics of college art school, but he clearly doesn't know his mark well enough to make contact. He points at his targets, and then, out of ineptitude or ignorance, fires in the air. It's a movie riddled with missed shots, strangely uncommitted to any of its plot threads, which wind up dangling and disconnected.

As the nerdy virgin, Jerome fits tidily into the gallery of tired teen-comedy types with which the movie brims. Zwigoff and writer Daniel Clowes want it both ways. First they ridicule the "living clichés" who inhabit art school, from the flaky bohemian chick to the dreadlocked hippie guy, and then have the nerve to present more stereotypes — Jerome's virgin, the gay fashion student, the chubby, bearded film student (Kevin Smith, anyone?) — for supposedly fresh fun-making.

Except for John Malkovich, who hits it occasionally as the peremptory art professor, no one is especially good in the movie, not even the reliable Jim Broadbent, who emits alcohol fumes and plumes of regret as a washed-up art-world genius. Minghella cuts a striking face, but his Jerome remains a nullity. He despairs quietly over a nude model (an unengaging Sophia Myles) while declaring his intent to be the greatest artist of the century. He can say it all he wants, but we never witness the fire of his ambition and Zwigoff seems uninterested in showing us more than glances of Jerome's artwork.

Instead, he lets a half-baked serial-killer plotline dilute what might have been better movie. It's a mystery with meta shades of "Scream" that's sloppily tacked on, leading to an odd, atonal ending that repeats a cultural cliché: that, no matter one's talent, notoriety is the fastest way to fame.

I originally thought that Zwigoff's flat, prosaic visuals in "Ghost World" were a deliberate interpretation of the characters' alienation and attempt to connote Clowes' surrealish comic book world. But after the homely nonstyle of both "Bad Santa" and "Art School Confidential," it appears Zwigoff has no aesthetic, that he points and shoots with little regard for dynamic lighting and composition. Is this, too, an attempt at satire, sending up the blah, burnished sheen of the cookie-cutter teen comedy?

Probably not, because Zwigoff can't even nail the massively easy target of art school. The director told us far more about the self-parodying sincerity of art class in a mere handful of scenes in "Ghost World" (which, like "Art School Confidential," is based on the adultish comic books by Clowes). Both movies depict art school as an enclave of pedantic posturing, a paint-specked platform of narcissistic expression where callow identity-seekers play dress-up and gratify fantasies of tortured creation.

Zwigoff and Clowes fail to penetrate that world this time. They peer at it and mock it through the shop window without ever going inside. Their modest effort lacks the vision and confidence of effective satire. This mediocre art project gets a C-minus.