What is art? Is it a Picasso in a gilded frame held captive in a museum or is it a Post-it note crumpled and tossed aside, left to languish next to the trash can, discarded, forgotten and, therefore, beautiful?

What is music? A marching order of notes scrawled across a page, played with painstaking accuracy, or the cacophony of a city street where high heels clicking are the percussion and car horns are the melody?

What is a movie that explores the finer points of laughably avant-garde creativity? It’s (Untitled) starring Adam Goldberg (Dazed and Confused, “Entourage”) as a tortured, gloomy composer whose work of noise-phonics is so “before its time” that its time will probably never come, and Marley Shelton (Grindhouse, Pleasantville) as the intoxicatingly beautiful, super chic gallerina who owns one of New York’s trendiest contemporary art spaces.

For a film so entrenched in the exhaustively self-congratulatory and indulgent world of cutting edge art, the plot is surprisingly predictable. Boy meets girl at his sparsely attended concert where he bangs keyboards, illicits howls from his singers, rattles chains and kicks metal buckets, girl “gets” his music and, despite the fact that she’s already dating his brother (Eion Bailey, best known for his outstanding work on “Band of Brothers”), whose highly successful paintings are too commercial to keep her hipster heart atwitter, their passions flare.

The film’s greatest asset, beyond Shelton’s bewitching beauty and symphonic wardrobe, is the utterly unexpected casting of gruff, monolithic, menacing Vinnie Jones (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) as Ray Barko, a “visionary artist” whose taxidermy sculptures are making him the next Basquiat. Watching Jones saunter around a gallery looking like a bizarre amalgam of Hunter S. Thompson and Jackson Pollock while the art world lauds his creepy creations is one of the few times (Untitled) invites the audience to be part of the fun.

Grade: C



(Untitled) releases in theaters Oct. 23.