The newest Charlie Kaufman film is as difficult a film to figure out as you'll see all year. It is without a doubt the most complex and intricate script the screenwriter has ever written, and from the writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich, that's saying a lot. It is easily the most philosophically thought-provoking film to see major release in years. It is a film that is intimidating in its ambition, yet charmingly intimate in execution. Yet at the same time, it's a film that never quite lives up to that ambition, can't seem to wrap itself around its complexities, nor rise to the challenge of its heady intellectualism.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman takes on the daunting role of Caden Cotard. Caden is a sad-sack, self-defeating regional theater director in Schenectady, NY, about to open his non-traditional reading of Death of a Salesman to the acclaim of everyone but his dour wife Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter whose specialty is miniature canvases so tiny that audiences at her gallery openings are given magnifying spectacles just to be able to see them. The couple is obviously falling apart. So is Caden himself, falling victim to increasingly gruesome and graphically depicted illnesses, highly irregular bowel movements and facial boils. When Adele heads to Europe with their daughter to become a cause célèbre in the Berlin art scene, Caden's grief is mitigated by the surprising announcement that he's received a MacArthur Genius Grant to put together a new stage work.

It's here that Kaufman's story takes a left turn from his usual quirkiness into territory that is both surreal and grandiose. His ideas play out on screen with a dreamlike logic, but without ever the slightest wink or nod at the audience. The line between reality and imagination, possibility and pipe-dream, become immaterial, and the film becomes the overflowing contents of a fertile mind spilled out all across the screen. Caden finds a warehouse in New York City the size of a massive airport and dozens of stories high, where he builds a life-size replica of the city to stage an autobiographical play that pulls in many of the actors from his regional productions. But as the years and decades of rehearsals and development pass and Caden's life rushes by, there is always more to add. He must cast someone to play himself as the director of the play within a play. And then someone to portray the actor portraying him. Another warehouse is built inside the first to portray the original warehouse. Another city replica is built indside. And then another warehouse. And another.

It's a dizzying high-wire act, and Kaufman the director, in his first ever turn behind the camera, isn't always up to the task. In the past, his outlandish ideas were always filtered through another director who could bend the screenplay into a more cohesive state. But Synecdoche is pure, undiluted Kaufman. His script demands a director who is equal parts Rube Goldberg and M.C. Escher, who can make this funhouse mirror of a script into something where the dazzle of invention shuns all confusion from the mind. Kaufman's effort is admirable, but at times all the overlapping stories, realities and dreams sit on the screen like a mess waiting to be cleaned up by Cotard, who quite fittingly has a minor obsession with housekeeping.

Synecdoche is quirky and often hilarious, yet has the power to induce tears unsullied by the suspicion that you've been manipulated into crying them. For a writer with a tendency to let things fall apart in the third act, Kaufman writes one of his most direct and satisfying endings, that may just make up for the mess that often precedes it. For all the sense that it lacks, it has a tender and straightforward emotional center that, over time, overshadows its shortcomings. Even if you come out of the theater with your head spinning, as the days pass (and this is a film that will cause endless internal debate for days and weeks), what emerges in your memory is a sweet and profound tale of the struggle to create meaning out of the messes of our lives.

Caden's emotional life (which, by the end, is inseparable from his artistic/professional life) may be a shambles. He spends most of his life estranged from both his wife and daughter. He has a constantly doomed lifetime love affair with his assistant Hazel (a devastatingly sharp and affecting performance by Samantha Morton). Happiness always seems one step out of reach. But Kaufman seems to be trying to get across that there is value to the effort of even a life that never fully fulfills its potential. Just as there is value to a film that might suffer the same malady.

Synecdoche, New York opens today at a handful of theaters around the area, including E Street, Bethesda Row, the AFI, Shirlington, and Fairfax's Cinema Arts.