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.