Movie depicts unique arts environment

With plenty of solid laughs and inside jokes, this film will be a cult perennial.
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
KANSAS CITY STAR
Welcome to art school. Please notice the colorful wildlife.
The angry lesbian.
The vegan holy man.
The beatnik art chick.
The preppie straight arrow.
The weepy girl.
The fashion major who hasn't figured out he's gay.
And our hero, the talented but bewildered suburbanite.
Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) has spent his young life being beaten up by bullies while fantasizing about becoming a great painter. Now this shy kid has been plopped down on a funky urban campus to study art and, it is hoped, lose his virginity. With a little luck he'll be discovered as the art world's next big thing.
The first 30 minutes of Terry Zwigoff's "Art School Confidential" are as funny as anything we've seen in ages. If you've ever hung around an art school, or even visited one, you can only admire the dead-on depiction of this unique environment.
The dark side
In these grungy halls blind ambition coexists with slacker indifference, pretension wrestles creativity to a draw and adolescent libidos go into overdrive. Most faculty members are here only because they need the health insurance or because teaching provides a fallback position while they try to resurrect their moribund careers. Classroom critiques of other students' art become an arena in which to exercise power, revenge and coercion.
A currently hot visiting artist smugly notes that only one in 100 students will actually earn a living from art. And a once-promising alum (Jim Broadbent) now lives in a slum a few blocks from campus, boozily railing at the unfairness of it all.
Adapting his comic book, writer Daniel Clowes ("Ghost World") paints a furiously funny portrait of this insular universe. He's so on the money that the movie often feels more like a hilarious anthropological study than a conventional narrative movie.
And therein lies the problem. Eventually the film has to turn from amusingly dour observations of this unique milieu and start telling a story. And there's not a whole lot of story to tell. We get a cliche -- the naive Jerome falls hard for the nude model (Sophia Myles) in his life drawing class -- and an over-the-top subplot about a serial killer who has been terrorizing the campus (everybody's a suspect).
Supporting cast
Despite running out of juice in its last half hour, "Art School Confidential" has enough solid laughs and insider jokes to become a cult perennial -- not unlike Zwigoff's earlier efforts: "Crumb," "Ghost World" and "Bad Santa."
The film has a deep supporting cast -- John Malkovich (delicious as a drawing teacher whose own art has devolved to painting pop-artish triangles), Steve Buscemi, Angelica Huston and Matt Keeslar (as a student whose utter lack of talent is misinterpreted as a brilliant deconstruction of art basics).
Like the recent "Thank You for Smoking," "Art School Confidential" eventually runs out of steam. But for the better part of an hour, it's the closest thing to actually going to art school.