If ever a place deserved to be nicknamed Ghost World, it is Hollywood, the home base from which countless intangible figures and scenes flicker in and out of our lives. And more often than not, Hollywood is as frustrating of the glorious dreams it inspires as the world inhabited by Dan Clowes' Enid and Becky. Its most persistent dream, of course -- grander than a romance on the Titanic or a raid on Darth Vader -- is that of making a movie. Comics professionals know this dream very well, as do the readers who follow every tidbit of news about the literally hundreds of comics-related projects at some level of development or consideration. By now, however, we've seen enough projects lost in limbo or -- worse -- carried through to some hideously distorted or laughably watered down travesty of their source material that we approach each new release with a mixture of delusional hope and cynical dread.

The more we like the comic (I like Ghost World very much, and while I'm at it, let me dutifully note that its publisher is also the publisher of TCJ), the uglier its potential transmogrification onto celluloid. The pendulum of expectation begins swinging from the first announcement. Ghost World, after all, is directed by Terry Zwigoff, a very hip, non-Hollywood guy who knows comics and directed the excellent documentary Crumb. It's true he caught some flak a while back for overly manipulating the subjects of his 1985 documentary Louie Bluie, but Ghost World is fiction anyway, so that can't be an issue here. In spite of everything, hope begins to grow: Surely, Zwigoff has a good shot at turning out a comics-related movie with integrity.

Then one remembers the protagonists of the comic -- teen-agers -- and one shudders to think of all the Dawson's Creek grads and Parties of Five hungering to sink their junior-thespian teeth into Enid or Becky. Few things bring out the worst in Hollywood like teen-agers. The possibilities are so terrifying that one movie slated for release later this year is called Not Another Teen Movie. (It's working title was Ten Things I Hate about Clueless Road Trips When I Can't Hardly Wait to Be Kissed, and even its parodic intent is not enough to convince one that it will be anything but another wretched teen movie.) In a worst-case scenario, one imagines the title changed to Bikini World, with Enid and Becky now opening their own topless car-wash business.

OK, are we done imagining that now?

The casting of Thora Birch (as Enid), who grew up from being the daughter of Harrison Ford in the hokey Jack Ryan movies to the more interesting daughter of Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, is a mitigating factor, but doesn't altogether calm our fears. You can't argue with the solid indy credentials of Steve Buscemi, though -- and our hopes begin to rise again. Then comes the amazing news that Dan Clowes is actually collaborating with Zwigoff. For the first time, we are told, a talented comics creator is being listened to on the set of a major motion picture. And so we give up. We start to think, yet again, that maybe this will be the one.

By the time this sees print, many will have had a chance to see Ghost World, the movie, and many will not. Its release schedule called for premieres in Los Angeles, New York and Seattle to be followed by limited Aug. 3 openings in nine major North American cities. How wide it will go and when will depend on its performance in those early venues. So far, so good. Birch won a Best Actress Award at the Seattle International Film Festival, and critics have responded with virtually universal acclaim, perhaps pleasantly surprised by what was, after all, a teen movie based on a comic book.

Those with higher expectations -- and, certainly, Ghost World purists -- are likely to experience at least a degree of disappointment. Some of the comic's air of aimless mystery has been paved over with the semblance of a Hollywood plot, and to that extent, the movie is a lesser work than the comic. But it's still a far better movie than we had a right to expect.

It begins almost perfectly: A giddily exuberant and hypnotic clip from what appears to be a Hindu variety show or Baliwood musical, American culture reflected almost unrecognizably through a foreign prism. The segment is exhaustingly over-the-top, in sharp contrast to the low-key movie that follows. It is also flagrantly strange and out-of-place -- paradoxically a non sequitur that comes at the head of a parade of non sequiturs and surreal juxtapositionings. A glimpse of an alternate-universe Hollywood, it is simultaneously low-brow and alien, mass culture that is nevertheless obscure, and you will not be able to get the musical number out of your head. The sequence is inter-cut under the credits with a slow nighttime pan of lower-middle-class American apartment windows until we come to Enid, who can be seen ecstatically dancing to the music. The Hindu performance is meant to suggest Enid's alienated passion, but already there is an apparent mis-step. As the pan proceeds from window to window, a TV set flickers in most of the apartments, but no screen is visible until we come to Enid's window and see the conclusion of the musical number on her set. Logically, we come to understand that Enid has been watching an obscure videotape obtained for her by an insufferably hip friend, but the impression given by the opening sequence is that the entire city is watching a Bombay TV station. This could have been avoided and Enid's isolation underscored by simply showing the blander, straighter fare on the other TV screens in the background of the pan.

From this frenzied St. Vitus's Dance, the movie cuts to an image of absolute immobility: a wheelchair-bound, metal-haloed, multi-plegic accident victim delivering a platitudinous speech at a high-school graduation assembly. Later, we are also asked to laugh at a nasty wheelchair-bound (Becky says he's faking it) coffee-shop customer who uses a laptop to cheat his way to a free daily cup of coffee. This is perhaps one too many gimp jokes even for a movie that eschews political correctness, but to Zwigoff, these figures are metaphors of a different kind of paralysis, which has overtaken the dishonest, technology-dependent modern world.

We have already observed by this time, however, that Zwigoff's movie suffers from a sort of paralysis of its own. After the opening pan, the camera scarcely moves. The vast majority of the film is given over to standard medium shots, as well as tracking shots of Enid and Becky walking, which amount to medium shots of the two with the background in motion. This is perhaps due to Zwigoff's background, where, as a documentary-maker who avoids narrating voice-overs, he has undoubtedly learned to make his points in the edits, the transitions from shot to shot. And in many ways, that approach suits his material here very well, comic books, after all, being all cuts and no movement.

With the camera largely stationary, meanings are generated in Ghost World by the juxtaposing of unlikely images and the contrasts are made sharper by the deep primary colors of cinematographer Affonso Beatto, who has worked with Pedro Almodovar. This bringing together of things that do not seem to belong together is a surrealist strategy that, at its extreme in the comic book, broaches on magical realism -- as with the phantom tagger, the nonexistent bus and the impossibly mutated Carrie Vandenberg. The film stops short of this, toning down Carrie's cancerous affliction and even dropping the Ghost World graffiti that gives the comic its name -- though the movie retains a hint of magical realism in its bus line to oblivion.

Sometimes the meanings that emerge from Zwigoff's use of montage are pointed, as when Becky's comment on the need for the two to "play it straight" while looking to rent a house is followed immediately by a shot of Enid dying her hair green. Here Enid's punk look is seen as a sabotage of Becky's plans for normalcy in a way that was not so directly communicated in the comic. Other times the transitions are simply dissonant or absurd, as with a cut to Josh sticking a pencil in his ear apropos of nothing.

The recontextualizing of disparate images is also at the heart of Enid's bricolage aesthetic (which culminates in her insertion of the shockingly racist Coon's Chicken logo image into the environment of a fine-art gallery) and much of the film (as with the comic) is spent feeling its way around questions of what is authentically cool or hip or art. The couple which Enid imagines to be Satanists are fascinating to her precisely because they are a couple and because they are seen in the banal, non-Satanic surroundings of the Quality Café, and she delights in reappropriating a rubber bondage mask for a stroll down the street. She defends her punk look on the grounds that it is not a contemporary pseudo-punk look, but an authentic evocation of '70s style. Only its anachronism makes it cool.

Zwigoff's movie adds a summer art class for Enid that allows it to make distinctions between real art and false art that amounts to a fairly predictable mockery of postmodern trends. It also condenses Bob Skeetes and the hapless "Bearded Windbreaker" into a single figure named Seymour and upgrades his role to that of romantic lead in the form of Steve Buscemi. In this new, plot-driven Ghost World, Enid's personal-ad prank, in which she calls Seymour and pretends to be another woman, leads her to recognize in him a kindred alienation even though he is decades older than her. She displaces her own attraction onto a quest to find a match for him, and, when a match is made, becomes jealous. Her connection to Seymour becomes the first rift in her aesthetic bond with Becky, which has up to then been characterized by lots of "I know"s and "Totally"s. She defends Seymour to Becky, saying, "He's such a clueless dork, he's almost kind of cool. You know what I mean?"

Becky responds, "Not really."

When Becky tells Enid that her wheelchair-bound customer is just faking it, Enid enthuses, "He's just lazy? That totally rules!"

Becky replies, "It totally doesn't!"

When Becky complains about all the "creeps, weirdos and losers" who come into her coffee shop, Enid argues, "Those are our people."

Indeed, the distinctions do get complicated. When is something so good it's bad? When is something so bad it's good and when is it so bad that, as Enid says, it's gone all the way round to being bad again? The corporate Starbucksesque coffee shop where Becky works (The Coffee Experience) is contrasted with a hipper non-corporate coffee house, where Enid finds the patrons (mostly young people like herself engaged in their own cultural rebellions) to be "pseudo-Bohemian losers" -- in other words, not the right kind of losers to be her people. Similar antagonisms are expressed in an ultra-hip zine store.

The question of coolness, the distinctions between what rules and what sucks are appropriately adolescent preoccupations, and Clowes has said that in creating Ghost World, he was channeling the Enid and Becky sides of himself. The dichotomies that develop in the movie Ghost World, however, have become something else altogether. Here Clowes seems rather to be channeling the Terry Zwigoff side of himself.

Enid is not drawn to bricolage (the recombining of elements in unfamiliar contexts -- a Nazi insignia alongside a Bugs Bunny pin on a leather jacket, for instance) because of any postmodern ideology, at least not directly. Its appeal lies in its celebration of not belonging, its expression of her alienation. Her distrust of fitting in is behind her rejection of both normal conventions and trendy rebellion. It is also what attracts her to losers like Seymour and loser havens like the surreally faux-1950s restaurant Wowsville. The pants that lie incongruously on the sidewalk every time they pass are a comfortable reference point for Enid and Becky and may be contrasted with the normal pants that Enid's respectable realtor rival Dana buys for Seymour in an effort at rehabilitating him. "Are they a good fit?" Enid asks Seymour, scornfully.

In the movie, however, the fault line has shifted. The division is no longer between fitting in and not fitting in; it is between the modern world and the past. Zwigoff has Enid falling for Seymour, a man of Zwigoff's age, who like Zwigoff, collects old jazz and blues records, because she can't resist the emotional authenticity of an old blues record. The romance between the two seems an older man's fantasy as shameless as anything perpetrated by Woody Allen. It culminates not so much in a literal sex act as in a momentary shot -- a slow fade from a reclining Enid to a close-up of Seymour's record playing, in which, as the phonograph needle is superimposed over her body, it seems to play her like a record.

Seen from the perspective of Seymour/Zwigoff, the movie's distinctions become clear: Enid has real talent, because she has the abilities of an old-fashioned comic-book artist (actually the abilities of Robert Crumb's daughter, Sophie, whose work is seen in Enid's sketchbook). The other art students and their teacher (Illeanna Douglas) are laughable because their work is foolishly modern. Laurel and Hardy are good, Seymour tells us. Modern cinema, with pretentious titles like The Flower that Drank the Moon, is bad. (An experience of Zwigoff's, in which a video-store clerk stupidly mistakes the good, old movie 8 1/2 for the modern bad movie Nine and a Half Weeks, is re-enacted in the film.) Rock music, zine stores and corporate and hip coffee shops alike are all bad because they are all modern. Enid cannot see any of herself in her fellow hipsters, because the script requires her to be repelled by her own milieu.

The world that Enid and Becky inhabit in the comic book is undeniably urban -- all windows and sidewalks, panels within panels -- but there is also an occasional tree or shrub, and the cover of the book even has a splash of sunlight, buzzing insects and flowers. Motivated by Zwigoff's indictment of the modern world, the movie exteriors have a drabness to them -- every skyline is criss-crossed with power lines and cables and cluttered with billboards and nearly every location has a corporate brand name. The only place with any warmth seems to be Seymour's lonely Dream Room refuge.

In the comic, Josh (played in the film by Brad Renfro), a handsome boy their own age, was the man who came between Enid and Becky, and the substitution of Seymour for Josh radically alters the dymamics of the triangle. Josh was a kind of counterpoint in the comic to Enid and Becky's endless anti-social kvetching. A basically decent young man, Josh's only real flaw is his passivity. His acceptance of Enid and Becky's eccentricities on the one hand and his healthy, politically aware adjustment to society on the other make him a kind of bridge, and as the two girls each become romantically involved with him, they flirt with a crossing to the adult world and all the betrayals and compromises that entails.

But if bedding Josh represents an accommodation with society, sleeping with Seymour represents the opposite. Enid's involvement with Seymour is a withdrawal into his time-warped Dream Room, even as Becky moves inexorably closer to the life of a socially respectable suburban hausfrau. By reducing the complexities of Ghost World to this simple choice between a modern reality and an imaginary past, Zwigoff comes perilously close to turning Enid into a puppet acting out an old man's rant against "progress." To his credit, Zwigoff doesn't quite let that happen, and in the end, there's no attempt to convince us that all Enid needs to pull her life together is a relationship with a middle-aged record-collector.

The storyline having been set in motion, however, there is some fumbling around toward the end as Zwigoff and Clowes grope for a resolution that is neither too tidy nor false to the spirit of the original comic.

It's ultimately a testament to Clowes' original creations that so much of Enid and Becky shines through all the tampering and compromises. And it's a testament to Zwigoff that he was able to keep the film as quiet and understated as it is and draw first-rate performances from his primary cast. Birch invests the manic Enid with a smart but naïve teen-age arrogance and vulnerability. Scarlett Johansson as Becky is shyer than drama queen Enid, but no less stubbornly independent. The two interact smoothly, whether presenting a unified front (their stiff-backed walk is hilarious) or drifting in separate directions. Buscemi plays Seymour with considerable subtlety, emphasizing his subdued resignation, while occasionally exploding with repressed anger and desire. In one scene, as he explains to Enid that there is as much hatred today as in America's racist past, "we just know how to hide it more," a pulpish poster on the wall behind him depicting a man with a gun threatening a woman with a low-cut bodice reminds us of the aggression hidden just beneath his own surface. (Stay past the closing credits to see an outtake lampooning Seymour's unleashed aggression.)

The injection of a relatively trite plot situation into Ghost World's more enigmatic stream of events is perhaps forgivable, since the film might otherwise never have been produced. Its greatest sin, the misappropriation of Enid's longing, is not so forgivable, though the overlap between Zwigoff's distaste for modernity and Enid's distrust of social acceptability makes it almost palatable. In any case, we want to forgive it, because so much is right about the movie.

Clowes and Zwigoff apparently saw eye-to-eye enough that they are planning another movie together. It's a movie that one hopes will be made, but already the pendulum has begun swinging again, as one notes cynically that Crumb and Zwigoff had also completed a screenplay together that appears to have become just another Hollywood ghost.