Come early! Come often! Made after the undervalued The Underneath and before his critical rebirth on the delicious Out of Sight, Steven Soderbergh's Schizopolis is a film that genuinely defies description. Part mid-life crisis, part Phil K. Dick paranoia fantasy, part self-help satire, the film, now belated receiving a UK release as part of the touring American Independence package, is the sort of piece that will have as many adherents as detractors. No, make that less adherents, more fanatics: this is seriously warped movie.

What's it about? Everything and nothing. Which is probably why Soderbergh elected to do what the great Atom Egoyan did in the off-message Calendar and cast himself in the lead. Leads. Because Soderbergh plays two different men, who just happen to look identical and share a single woman. As Fletcher Munson, he pens a speech for the corporation behind the improbably named T. Azimuth Schwitters (Mike Malone), a guru possessed of a scary New Age evangelism. He has a growing paranoia over a string of phone calls tempting him to industrial espionage, and doesn't even notice that his wife (Betsy Brantley, the former Mrs. Soderbergh) might or might not be having an affair with Dr. Jeffery Korchek, Munson's successful dentist doppelganger. And then there's the bug exterminator who routinely beds female clients.

If Kafka left you scratching your head then Schizopolis will probably have a more direct, more explosive, more Cronenbergian effect on it. The narrative, such as it is, is fractured into a triptych (and beyond), but even saying that does little to convey the almost random unfolding evidenced in this piece of self-confessed guerrilla film-making.

You might have stood more of a chance - stood any kind of a chance - were the film possessed of anything like conventional dialogue, but even here Soderbergh moves to dissolve any link with reality. The bug man, for example, finds himself conversing - in what look like porno-loop rehearsals - in seemingly random word-plays, while Munson and his wife have reduced intimate communication to its base level ("Generic greeting!") The film, we therefore suspect, is actually about a lot of things but none so much as language, both verbal and filmic. Perhaps. Certainly its playful chronology prefigures the elaborate time structures of Out of Sight.

That you stay to the end - where Soderbergh himself appears on screen to take questions, no less - is testimony surely to the fact that the film, whatever it's visual and aural leaps, makes at least some kind of sense. It's certainly ambitious, is seldom still for long, and looks distinctive, with a central performance from its writer-director that ricochets between endearing and downright frustrating. It looks like a comedy - it looks a bit like a US Monty Python hangover in places - but is ultimately more oppressive than actually funny. It sounds as though it ought to be profound and yet doesn't ever seem to come out and say what's on its rapidly fragmenting mind. It's lazy criticism to call it a cult in the making, but you just know that in some quarters the video cassette will be very highly prized indeed. Soderbergh is a fascinating film-maker. I liked it. I liked it a lot.