Titters and guffaws greeted opening credits, thick sans serif white on black: Written, Directed, Edited and Produced by Vincent Gallo. A repeat performance at a closing Vincent Gallo Rides a Honda RS 250 (imported, says my local dealer, at about fifteen thousand dollars). In between, the musician-painter-photographer and self-admitted difficult control freak, is onscreen uninterruptedly in his 36th film while serving also as Director of Photography and, “looking at myself in the monitor while filming,” camera operator.

Its title perhaps from home and pet-shop scenes or partly as a suggested metaphor for the cuddly and safe, The Brown Bunny is sure to be released unrated and already generating buzz for a minute of as graphic sex as American screens bear. A fatally flawed film, it looks at the damaged goods of love, framing itself in the racked mind of Gallo’s Bud Clay, who motors cross-country in search of his inner Daisy (Chloë Sevigny), with geographical spots triggering fantasies or memories. The film’s only unequivocal dream sequence must, given the past it uncovers, be precisely this encounter with his woman; and that all white-background scene employs a too-easy voiced “narration” to explain its now-impossible visual happenings.

Following a New Hampshire motorcycle race, Bud ramps his golden Number 77 into a Dodge van and heads for the West Coast. Throughout the journey, symbolic that he himself is elsewhere or off-center, he is usually, and unusually, off to one extreme frame-side, silhouetted rather than three-quarters or head-on. Non-verbal, mumbling unintelligibly when he does speak, Gallo would convey emotion by casting his face down and rubbing his brows, silent on the highways by night and day, rain or desert glare, through wiper- and bug-streaked windshields although the black van remains amazingly unsoiled outside.

Soon, at her aunt and uncle’s rural gas station, Bud gets very young Violet (Anna Vareschi) to “please, please, come with me,” drives her home, and simply leaves while she is inside packing. In the Midwest, he stops at Daisy’s house, where, during realistic but excruciatingly slow moments, Mrs. Lemon (Mary Morasky) cannot remember that he grew up next door or that she visited her daughter and him in California. She asks if this “stranger” has children, but the apparently charged issue remains mumblingly unresolved, as he sets off again.

He eats mashed potatoes in a Chinese fast-food place and, at a rest stop past Saint Louis, nearly wordlessly but passionately kisses lonely Lilly (Cheryl Tiegs), then at once silently turns and departs, alone.

Following a brief mirage-heightened spin on his bike at Bonneville’s Salt Flats, he picks up young daytime Vegas hooker Rose (Elizabeth Blake) -- the three women all wear their names -- treats her at McDonalds, then drops her, too. The road itself emerges as a, perhaps the, protagonist, as America’s historic movement to the Pacific is reenacted; but a journey is inarticulate, and, aside from baggage and loneliness, the characters are, too, and a movie cannot be built on stoic faces. If, as has been written, this is a “frank portrayal of male sexuality,” then that libido is merely tedious, insecure boredom.

In L.A., Bud knocks at his and Daisy’s door. No answer, a gardening neighbor says no one’s there, so on a chance he writes his address and phone number and instructs the motel clerk to be sure to pass on Daisy’s call or to let her in.

In the radio- and TV-less starkness of the motel, now-teetotaler Bud awaits his demons. But, borne back ceaselessly into the past, he is already lost, along with the audience. 

(Released by Wellspring; not rated by MPAA.)