Grade: C+

Verdict: An ambitious urban whodunnit undercut by a weak plot.

Details: Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Colm Feore, Aunjanue Ellis. Rated R for language, some violence and sexuality. One hour, 45 minutes.

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Review: After making one of the most impressive, out-of-nowhere film debuts of 1997 with “Eve's Bayou,” director Kasi Lemmons return with “The Caveman's Valentine.” It's a work whose visual assurance is undercut by a script that's sometimes as ludicrous as it is ambitious.

In “The Caveman's Valentine,” Samuel L. Jackson (the film's executive producer) plays homeless, mentally imbalanced New Yorker Romulus Ledbetter, also known as Caveman. That's because he lives, yep, in a cave in a Manhattan park.

Though now a long-dredded paranoid schizophrenic convinced that an imaginary enemy named Stuyvesant is monitoring his actions from the Chrysler Building, Romulus used to be an artist. A pianist, in fact, Juilliard trained. One day, he piques the interest of a yuppie named Bob (Anthony Michael Hall), borrowing a pen from the guy so he can jot down a few notes of the unfinished symphony in his head.

Bob becomes a minor but key acquaintance after Romulus discovers the frozen body of a famous photographer's male model, perched on a tree outside his cave. Taking it as a personal message from über-lord Stuyvesant, Romulus grows convinced that the dead boy was murdered, though his daughter Lulu (Aunjanue Ellis) doesn't buy it.

In of the script's many too-convenient coincidences, Lulu happens to be a cop. And one of Romulus's old Juilliard classmates turns out to be a friend of Leppenraub (Colm Feore), the rich-and-famous photographer whom Romulus suspects is the murderer. And wouldn't you know it, Leppenraub's sister Moira (Ann Magnuson) takes a shine to Romulus, inviting him not only into her bed but into her confidences.

These oh-so-convenient plot devices might not matter if the mystery was more compelling (the denouement, for one, is a tone-deaf doozy). But “Valentine” unfolds in a catty, high-art New York circle filled with interchangeable, two-dimensional characters.

Leppenraub seems to be a stand-in for gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and the movie shows us some of the character's work: tacky photos of naked boys posed as angels or St. Sebastian, the kind you might find on the greeting card shelf of a gay boutique. Gallery-worthy, they aren't. The script works a little too hard trying to equate high art and gay sexuality as the natural breeding grounds for torture and murder; it's both salacious and a little silly.

Whereas Lemmons both wrote and directed “Eve's Bayou,” “Valentine” is scripted by George Dawes Green, adapting his own novel. The sometimes tin-eared result suggests it could have used massaging by more skilled hands. (There's one real howler. When Romulus blows his own cover with a psychotic rant during a swank cocktail party, his old Juilliard pal screams, “You lied to me — you're still living in that cave, aren't you!”)

What keeps you watching, besides Jackson's predictably intense performance, is Lemmons' direction. She keeps things interesting even when the plot is shrieking off its tracks. You can see what drew her to the project — not the whodunnit aspects, but the challenge of showing us the world as seen through the eyes of a schizophrenic. How does a man plagued by visions of evil rays powering off skyscrapers, and moth-men batting against the inside of his brain try to track down the truth in a real world he's scarcely anchored on?

The first half hour is definitely the movie's best part, showing us the surreal struggle between reality and Romulus's hallucinations. But even as the character is trying to pull himself together, “Valentine” gradually falls apart.

— Steve Murray, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution