As someone who sees hundred of movies a year, dozens of which could have been made by a machine and just as many that feel like they're made FOR machines, it is at least partially refreshing to see something as bizarrely unique as Crispin Hellion Glover's It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE! Like an avant-garde musician who uses household items as instruments or a performance artist who speaks only in pig Latin, Glover doesn't see film in the same way as you, I, or probably anyone else you know. Here in Chicago, Glover is introducing his newest experiment with an hour-long slide show that consists of photographs of pages of books he has written. Glover than reads what you see on the screen. Like the slide show, Glover's film is not quite like anything else you've ever seen. Complete weariness of what Hollywood has been producing lately might lead some movie goers to praise It Is Fine! based on originality alone, but if they step back and judge the film they'll realize that it's as much smoke and mirrors as the blockbusters they're so quick to deride.

It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE! stars Steven C. Stewart, who also wrote the screenplay. Mr. Stewart is a wheelchair-bound sufferer of cerebral palsy and he's almost impossible to understand coherently when he speaks. The film opens with Stewart's character, Paul Baker, crashing to the floor of a rehab facility. From the very beginning, you can tell that Stewart and Glover are working in Lynchian territory, as Paul stares at an old photograph and we start to delve deep into the mind of this troubled man. In his dream world, Paul sleeps with a variety of women (including hardcore sex) and even turns into a rather efficient serial killer. After marrying divorcee Linda Barnes (Margit Carstensen), Paul kills her. He then moves on to her daughter, a model, and more unwilling victims. In one of many odd twists, we can't understand a word that Paul says, but all the women who cross his path can perfectly. Until he strangles them.

There's actually a wealth of decent material in the story of a man with cerebral palsy who hides dark visions of sex and murder in a mind that can't express itself to the outside world. There are moments of It Is Fine! where the sadness of Paul (and, one can assume, by extension, Mr. Stewart) comes through, but it's too often overshadowed by a sense that Glover is trying to make a film that's weird just for weird's sake. If you pull out the physical handicap of its lead, there's nothing at all to It Is Fine! and it would have been a much stronger movie if the filmmakers had started with a great story around Mr. Stewart instead of allowing all of the dramatic weight to rest on his shoulders. Glover is an unusual and often-fascinating actor and It Is Fine! shows signs of the wit and originality he possesses as an actor but there's a fine line between trying something new and just making something bizarre. You may have never seen anything like It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE! but that doesn't necessarily mean that you ever should.

It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE! opens this weekend at the Music Box in Chicago and has played other festivals around the world all year with other arthouse openings across the country yet to come. Check your local listings.