Opens Friday, August 29, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

This exceedingly strange movie, directed by Nick Cassavetes, started its life as She's De Lovely (the title refers to an old Cole Porter tune), an unproduced '70s screenplay left behind when the director's father, John Cassavetes, died in 1989. Some things are meant to last forever, but the script at hand obviously had a hard time limping through the past two decades.

Robin Wright Penn (merely Robin Wright back in the days of Forrest Gump) stars as Maureen Quinn, a clumsy, fierce, bottle-blonde junkie who really, really loves her fast-talking, unreliable husband, Eddie, played by Sean Penn. When we meet the Quinns, Eddie's been gone for days and Maureen is at her wit's end–a trip that didn't take long. First, she warns a psychiatric social worker (Chloe Webb, in a one-scene cameo) that Eddie may blow a fuse if he comes home; then, she makes sure it happens when he does.

I guess we should see it coming: Eddie makes pronouncements like "I keep gettin' fables to cover foibles," "Everybody pisses on you and you wonder why you're wet," and–my personal favourite–"Okay, now the monkeys are in the trees." But everybody on Planet Cassavetes talks that way–sort of a Damon Runyon Lite, with extra psychological licence. (Maureen, admittedly, is limited to epithets along the lines of "You're such a cruel asshole.") It's only after Eddie totally flips–he orders a double Siberian Mist down at the local boozehole and pulls a gun when the men in white suits arrive–that we learn of his delicate condition.

Ten years later–not that either era is recognizable–and after a genuinely moving visit with a tough social worker (played by the director's mother, Gena Rowlands), he's on the loose again. Maureen, however, is remarried, to a swaggering builder named Joey (John Travolta), and has borne three small daughters. Whatever. Eddie wants back in, and Maureen–long since past the drugs, peroxide, and even the odd hospital visit–still wants him. The last third of the movie offers the pleasure or curse, depending on your point of view, of watching the two husbands pissing at each other and wondering why they're wet.

Wright Penn suffers well, but her character (kind of a Judy Holliday riff without laughs) doesn't have much to recommend it, or define it, in either section. Overall, it's hard to know what to make of this human demolition derby, in which the lowlife characters' serious flaws are passed off as romantically "cute" self-destruction (fables, not foibles), and Harry Dean Stanton–the Keith Richards of American cinema–is presented as a reassuring face. (There's so much secondhand smoke, the movie should come with a warning label.) What's really weird is that the director, who had such a firm grip on Unhook the Stars, seems to think it's all a big joke, keeping an ironic distance and layering bluesy ditties or jocular lounge music on the soundtrack, while the actors–especially the brow-furrowing Penn–handle their endless professions of love and resentment with utter sincerity.

This mixture of tones–all the way from stagy speechifying to cornball slow-motion running scenes–may be jarring, but it is entertaining, in a randomly postmodern sort of way. As you can see from its now-neutered title, She's So Lovely is an old-fashioned movie with no faith in its own history; as a spoof, it has no obvious targets. By the time Travolta's character starts spouting non sequiturs and asking "What the fuck are you talkin' about?" of anyone in earshot, you're just about used to the film's loopy rhythms. Even so, you don't expect him to hand his nine-year-old a bottle of beer, or for her to drink it! Oh yeah, he also calls her "a glorified piece of blue sky". Unpredictability–a hallmark of the elder Cassavetes's largely improvised films–is a virtue, but most of the time, Lovely looks like it simply slipped off its medication.