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Kaufman was the most unconventional comic during the late '70s and early '80s, devising strange little routines that often made, at best, only a kind of oblique sense and sometimes carried more than a whiff of hostility toward his audience. Even his regular stint on the hugely popular "Taxi" didn't dilute him: He channeled the weirdness of his stand-up act into his character, the immigrant-as-moonbeam Latka, without any sense of compromise.

Man on the Moon Directed by Milos Forman Starring Jim Carrey, Danny DeVito and Courtney Love

What's peculiar about his legacy, though, is that he doesn't seem any more comprehensible today then he did when he was alive. Seeing old "Saturday Night Live" footage of the comedian with his little record player, anxiously waiting for his cue as the scratchy "Mighty Mouse" theme cruised on by (he would lip-sync only to the line, "Here I come to save the day!"), doesn't help illuminate him any. Kaufman wasn't of his time; he wasn't of any time.

Kaufman died of cancer at age 35. Today it almost doesn't seem as if he's gone, because he doesn't seem like anything we could have dreamed in the first place. It's more as if he'd been scooped up by a space vessel and whisked back to that place, wherever it is, he really belonged. You could miss him, sure, but somehow time seemed to rush in pretty quickly to fill the space he once occupied. It was as if he'd been something of an embarrassment to the gods, an aberration: "We didn't actually mean to send him down; it was a bit of a mistake." Before long, it was easy to ask yourself if he'd ever really been here.

Milos Forman's distressingly disjointed biopic "Man on the Moon" doesn't attempt to explain Andy Kaufman, which is one good thing about it. What was the genesis of the little schemes he devised with his co-writer and collaborator Bob Zmuda (a co-executive producer of "Man on the Moon"), like the sleazy lounge performer alter-ego Tony Clifton? Was there a streak of evil in him that caused him to cook up little pranks, often at his audience's expense? Why did he decide he wanted to wrestle women? Did he like playing Latka on "Taxi," or did he constantly resent it?

These are questions Forman never attempts to answer fully. Instead, he just floats them in the ozone like little imaginary boats, trusting that star Jim Carrey's characterization of Kaufman will touch on all of them, either as vaguely or as succinctly as an expressionistic poem -- Forman doesn't seem to care which. The result is a movie that's too conventional to capture Kaufman's insanity and too haphazard, too shapeless, to recapture Kaufman's energy in any meaningful way. Carrey's remarkable performance simply seems stranded. It's the heart of the movie, and yet it also seems strangely swallowed by it, thumping to get out.

It's frustrating that the movie starts out as cleverly as it does. Carrey, looking more like Kaufman than I ever would have imagined, addresses the camera directly: "Thank you for coming to my movie," he says meekly, unblinking. He then prattles through a half-sensical explanation of how any movie about his life would probably be filled with untruths, after which he announces that the movie is over. The credits roll; music plays. "I am not fooling. Goodbye," he tells us. "Go." He leaves, but then peeks back in from the edge of the frame.

That prologue is a more perfect summation of what Kaufman was about than anything that comes after it. It's the only sensible way to try to sum up a man who could invite a whole audience out for milk and cookies after a big Carnegie Hall show, a man who would test the limits of an audience's patience by reading them "The Great Gatsby" all the way through, a man who some believe may have even faked his own death.

But before long that exquisite beginning starts to read more like an apology than a declaration, as if Forman were simply excusing himself from clear storytelling. We see Kaufman meeting up with his manager, George Shapiro (Danny DeVito), for the first time. As they sit in a restaurant discussing the possibilities of their partnership, a small teardrop of ooze starts to drip from Kaufman's nostril. Shapiro does his best to ignore it; when he's not looking, Kaufman quickly switches it to the other nostril (it's fake, of course). The gimmick has a stupid kind of brilliance, and in that sense it's pure Kaufman.

Next page | How to show the interior life of someone who was just plain weird?