There's a strange disconnect between image and text in Ralph Bakshi's Cool and the Crazy. Dealing as it does with young marrieds and their second thoughts, the script would seem to be full of anguished regret as the central couple drifts apart and is disappointed in their ill-advised rush towards marriage. But these images of the 1950s are as downbeat as a two-tone T-Bird with chrome detailing: they aim for sleekness, a professional sheen that betrays the complexity of the material they're supposed to be rendering. I'd like to say that this is one of those situations where a script triumphs over its direction, but what actually happens is that the former's play for seriousness is defeated by the trivializing noise of the latter. The pain is dulled, and all that lingers are a number of '50s cars and costumes that have nothing to do with the tale being told.

The young couple in question consists of Michael (Jared Leto) and Roselyn (Alicia Silverstone), high school sweethearts who got hitched in the hopes that their love would last forever; alas, Roselyn becomes restless after becoming trapped at home with their infant child. She's stifled, and wants to break out--and unfortunately for Michael, she's got a wild friend named Joannie (Jennifer Blanc) to get her into trouble. Taking her out for alcoholic romps, she gets her involved with Joey (Matthew Flint), an also-married no-goodnik who sees her as purely an object of lust. Michael, naturally, is not impressed with the challenge to his home and castle, and many fights ensue, sending him out one night to sleep with a free-loving beatnik chick who knows better than to buy into the dream that the couple thought would keep them safe.

On the face of it, the film is dealing with an interesting moment in American cultural history: the point at which the ideal of the nuclear family began to disintegrate, with the beatniks pounding out the rhythm and rock 'n' rollers playing the melody to a common culture's death knell. As such, it ought to play a lot more painfully than it does, its series of betrayals and rebellions so sustained that it should by all rights rip the characters apart. But somehow, Bakshi the writer never quite lines up with Bakshi the aesthetician. The latter is all too eager to show the sheen of the '50s as thrilling and all-encompassing, with buff-shined classic wheels, happy neon-lit diners, and fashions that look like they've never been worn more than once. The truth is that Bakshi doesn't really know how to articulate the inner states of his figures--all he knows is surfaces, from those of the objects in front of his camera to those that have defined the look of looking back in a haze of American Graffiti nostalgia.

This shouldn't be more than a petty nuisance, but somehow, the approach takes over your understanding of the material--all of the problems are just a story on the way to its inevitable completion. Leto and Silverstone are impossibly chirpy, Blanc is an overenthusiastic tramp, and that beatnik chick is one hell of a sexual fantasy; no problem is truly a problem, and whatever happens is really no big deal. Thus Cool and the Crazy destroys whatever chance we have of investing in the story by undercutting it with its approach, and the result is that we're as disconnected from the story as the visuals are. I can only marvel at how Bakshi, who masterminded indelicate working-class tours-des-forces like Heavy Traffic and American Pop, could have turned in a film so deluded in its visual rendering of similar subject matter. It's not very cool and crazy only in its lunatic take on the material.

Nobody at distributor Dimension seems to have worried too much about the quality of this disc: Cool and the Crazy's fullscreen transfer (faithful to its Showtime origins) has been so lazily handled that detail can barely be glimpsed through the screen-door pixellation. While the colours are suitably vivid, blurriness is rampant, making an already sloppy production seem even more slapdash. The Dolby Surround track fares somewhat better, sounding as good as a '90s cable movie can--which is not very, to be honest. While the audio is lacking a fullness of timbre, it's far more robust than the image. There are no extras.-Travis Hoover