If, among actors-turned-filmmakers, Clint Eastwood stands on one pole of classical restraint, Hopkins certainly stands on its opposite: Mere minutes into ``Slipstream,'' and it's clear that a yen for every conceivable production and post-production tool for image and sound manipulation, plus an itch for the concepts of louder, jumpier, faster and even louder, has consumed Hopkins' desires to make a movie. This is a faux experimental work rather than a genuine one, since it doesn't break with standard storytelling modes and feels suffocating in its imitation of previous break with conventional cinema, starting most obviously with Fellini's ``8 ½'' and onward to the dream-like films of David Lynch.

Opening section introduces screenwriter Felix Bonhoeffer (Hopkins), taking in a horserace and a lunch with lady friend Lily (Lana Antonova), before getting stuck in a Los Angeles freeway traffic jam that explodes with an act of severe road rage. Possibly a foretelling of his own death, scene links with discussion of the ``slipstream,'' or the medium to experience past life regressions. This idea, however, is never carried out through the film's course.

Outside a bar at night, Bonhoeffer tries to talk to Gina (Stella Arroyave) and has an encounter with bouncer Mort (Michael Clarke Duncan), who is next seen driving menacing hitman Ray (Christian Slater) to the desert. Ray kills Mort point-blank, and enters a diner with partner Geek (Jeffrey Tambor). In an overlong scene that seems to want to revive bits of ``The Petrified Forest,'' Ray intimidates and terrorizes the patrons, including aging movie queen Bette (Fionnula Flanagan) and hard-working server Bonnie (S. Epatha Merkerson).

Scene cuts, though, revealing a cast and crew making a movie directed by amateurish Gavin (Gavin Grazer), contending with the problem that Slater's actor self, named Matt Dobbs, soon thereafter dies (off-screen) on the set. Script gal Barbara (Camryn Manheim) tries to keep Gavin on track, but a crisis call to obnoxious producer Harvey Brickman (John Turturro, evidently doing someone's idea of a human Tex Avery cartoon, by way of Harvey Weinstein) only brings more grief to the already ego-stuffed set.

Depiction of the Hollywood shoot seethes with contempt and satiric excess on Hopkins' part, but it in no way jibes with the more interiorized sections devoted to Bonhoeffer, even when he's called upon to devise re-writes to cover for Dobbs' sudden death. What also becomes clearly evident is that underneath a battery of constant optical and digitized visual hiccups and devices (subliminal and shock cuts among them), as well as a nervous soundtrack that surely kept Hopkins' sound engineers and designers working long hours, is a quite conventional tale of an aging writer who can't handle the pressures nor the line between the real and the imagined.

The veneer of stylistic hyperactivity can't conceal the starkly banal dialogue and a roster of performances that seem, under the circumstances, hardly directed at all. Hopkins himself plays an effectively haunted and distracted figure who suggests an intellectual sidetracked into shlock cinema, but the only other perf of real credibility belongs to Merkerson, one of the few actors in sight who seems to have taken the assignment seriously. A bit featuring ``Invasion of the Body Snatchers'' star Kevin McCarthy strives for cinephile wit, but goes nowhere.

An A-team of technical masters has been assembled by Hopkins, led by the sun-tinged cinematography by Dante Spinotti. Like Eastwood, Hopkins composes his own score, but its sentimentality is at odds with the results on screen. Print screened at Sundance contained no title nor company credits.

Camera (Deluxe color, black-and-white, Panavision widescreen), Dante Spinotti; editor, Michael R. Miller; music, Hopkins; production designer, Ismael Cardenas; set decorator, Laura Evans; costume designer, Julie Weiss; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS), Shawn Holden, David Ronne, Coleman Metts; sound designer, Wylie Stateman; supervising sound editor, Stateman; sound re-recording mixers, Marc Fishman, Tony Lamberti; sound effects designer, Ann Scibelli; visual effects supervisor, Payam Shohadai; special effects coordinator, Ron Trost; visual effects, Luma Pictures; assistant director, James Sbardellati CQ; second unit camera, Chris Moseley, Chris Haarhoff CQ. Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (New Frontiers), January 20, 2007. Running time: 97 MIN.