But throughout it all I kept feeling that Maclean's cautious, tactful, obsessively loyal handling of Johnson's material is misguided, that she never reaches near the book's terrifying lows or giddy, out-of-body highs. When Fuckhead tells us that his day stripping copper wire out of an empty house with Wayne was one of the best of his life we have no idea why, and Fuckhead's outrageous visions -- heavenly angels at a drive-in, a homoerotic Jesus in a laundromat -- are depressingly literal-minded. "Jesus' Son" cries out for a vivid and daring translation into film, not a conscientious transcription. A director like Quentin Tarantino or Gus Van Sant, although I have serious misgivings about both, would have understood the need not just to condense "Jesus' Son" but to remake and reimagine it.

As an interior narrative of a psychological voyage into the abyss of the self and back out again, Johnson's "Jesus' Son" belongs to a tradition that includes Dostoevski's "Crime and Punishment" and Jim Carroll's "The Basketball Diaries." The former has never been filmed with much success (we'll see about the upcoming "Crime and Punishment in Suburbia") and the latter resulted in a lamentable Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle that will only be remembered as an alleged inspiration to the Columbine High School killers. I don't feel great about adopting a condescending tone toward a director of such evident and genuine talent, especially when movie theaters are full of mendacious crap. Maclean is likely to make much better films, and "Jesus' Son," with all its flaws, is worth one or two viewings. But maybe what it tries to do simply can't be done.

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