The first thing anyone says in Art School Confidential is “I am a genius.” That would be young Jerome, standing before his provincially suburban classmates dressed as his idol, Pablo Picasso. Other facts about Jerome: bullies torment him; girls ignore him; the world will one day recognize him; and the events of the film he’s in—if for no other reason than that it was written by Daniel Clowes and directed by Terry Zwigoff—will savagely disillusion him. We know immediately that Jerome is no Picasso, and that we’ll get to watch him find out.

Nobody in this movie is simply a hero or a villain, a hack or a genius—in the film, as in life, those old categories seem trite and worn out—though just about everybody is a bit of a bullshit artist. Adapted by Oakland graphic novelist Clowes from a popular installment of his serial comic Eightball (ongoing since 1989), the film is his second collaboration with Zwigoff. The two live near each other and share an artfully disaffected sensibility, a mutual bad reaction to our culture of affectation, polarized as it is into extremes of vapid commercialism and arch, irony-drenched detachment. It’s a culture in which assimilation isn’t worth much. So it’s a good thing that Clowes and Zwigoff have each other.

Clowes, an art school survivor himself and for years an artist of deserved alt-culture esteem, is a real storyteller, the first cartoonist to contribute a story to Esquire’s annual fiction issue, in 1998. Throughout the late 1980s and ’90s he made his reputation skewering the pretense and conformity of middle-class suburban America in the clean, chromatic lines of his comics Lloyd Llewellyn and Eightball, works as deeply felt as they are ferociously satirical. When a Clowes character calls human beings “the ugliest creatures in all of nature,” it registers.

Most of us discovered Zwigoff through his prize-winning Sundance breakthrough, Crumb (1994), an absorbing and disturbing documentary on the dysfunctional brilliance of underground comix artist Robert Crumb and his even more dysfunctional family. Later, Zwigoff reportedly declined offers to direct movies such as The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Elf (2003), which went to Sofia Coppola and Jon Favreau, respectively. He even declined $10,000 to portray himself in a Gap commercial. What he did instead was a film so commercially not viable by Hollywood standards that it took him nearly five years to get it made. Ghost World (2001), an adaptation of Clowes’s elegantly listless graphic novel, follows two callow-but-jaded teenage friends, played by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johanssen (with support from Steve Buscemi as what Birch’s character calls “such a clueless dork that he’s almost kind of cool”), wading into strip-mall-tacky life after high school and brooking its expected disappointments with tenacious, deadpan mockery. Clowes and Zwigoff shared screenwriting credit as well as an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay. After making Bad Santa, with

Billy Bob Thornton, in 2003, Zwigoff was ready to reconvene with Clowes and head off to Art School.

And what of the disappointments in store there for poor Jerome? Should we admire or feel sorry for a kid who goes to college specifically to become the greatest artist of the 21st century and who swoons over the nude model in the art school brochure? Jerome (Max Minghella) is not exactly a guileless, affable striver; Clowes and Zwigoff take him about as far away from genius as you can get, depicting the poor lad as by turns a craven nonentity and a lazy poseur. When his fellow artistes—introduced early in a trenchant parade of phonies and self-evident hacks—do preposterous or pretentious work, Jerome does manage to speak up on behalf of taste and merit, but it’s not as if he has any original ideas himself. As another student observes, “Jerome is totally in the box.” He gets an A, but so does everybody else. Worse, he must also contend with the preppy jock whose naive, primitivist pictures get all the attention, especially from that model Jerome had his eye on. And then there is the matter of the campus serial killer.

Whether it’s a masterstroke or a tragic flaw, Art School Confidential feels like many kinds of movie in one. If it isn’t quite a coming-of-age story or a black comedy or a romance or a mystery thriller, that’s because it tries dressing itself in the conventions of those genres only to decide they all look silly. “Don’t have unrealistic expectations,” barks Jerome’s professor, at once unctuous and pitiable and therefore inevitably played by John Malkovich. “Only one out of 100 of you will ever make a living as an artist.” It’s exactly the scene you remember from all those movies about med school and law school and whatever else, and a deflating parody of them as well.

What remains is Art School Confidential’s own weary ambivalence about indulging predictable movie tropes, a mood that will rub many viewers the wrong way but is one of the film’s most forceful expressions. The film has an unsettling rhythm that won’t let you decide whether its aesthetic positions, like those of Jerome’s professor, are for real or winkingly full of it. As with Ghost World’s striking lack of affect, we’re supposed to wonder: is this tone a problem or a preference?

All this angst about its own artifice has made it jittery and, in its spoofery, more than a little brutal. Zwigoff seems to have developed his own subgenre: call it pretensploitation, a purposefully misanthropic mode descending as much from campy pulp (High School Confidential) as from cerebral satire (American Beauty crossed with vintage Woody Allen). He values authen-ticity and the negation of pretense: from Crumb to Ghost World to Bad Santa, Zwigoff’s work often reflects his fretting about how to be both graceful and genuine in a maliciously mercenary, hyper-image-conscious world.

Clearly he’s found an ally in Clowes, who favors anxious weirdos with obscure, disorderly lives. Even as it disavows eye-of-the-beholder pieties and dodges its own pronouncements, Art School Confidential betrays

a suspicion of refined beauty as too precious, not real enough. The filmmakers seem to figure that most of us have given up on trying to decide what’s good anyway. As if exhausted and depressed by this futile effort, their movie doesn’t really say whether art can achieve a lasting emotional truth, and whether that should be what decides its worth. Instead, Art School Confidential points out that recognition, which is just a euphemism for celebrity, is the more common goal.

At the risk of giving too much away, it may be said that the movie allows Jerome some success—but only as a function of celebrity, and that from a potent compound of fraudulence and criminal violence. It’s prescient. Having burned out on postmodern confusion about what we think good art is, we have settled for what we think we recognize. And as everything from prime-time TV to the literary scandals of JT Leroy and James Frey attest, ours is a culture so ravenous for “authentic” art that we’ll even fake it if we have to. By filming their young artist’s journey from one kind of fake genius to another, Clowes and Zwigoff have anticipated this sorry state we’re in, even if they don’t know how to get us out of it.

Art School Confidential directed by Terry Zwigoff, written by Daniel Clowes, and starring Max Minghella. Plays in the San Francisco International Film Festival April 26; opens in Bay Area theaters May 5.