Just when all the men in America were beginning to believe that size doesn’t matter, along comes Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg), whose 13-inch gift serves as the foundation of the two-and-a-half-hour Boogie Nights.

From the very beginning, Boogie Nights distinguishes itself with a unique visual style. For several uncomfortable seconds, we sit in darkness listening to the ominous thumping of the first beats of an eerie soundtrack. Suddenly, the music springs to life and we are immersed in the world of bright lights and lively activity that will become Boogie Nights. In a single shot, the camera twists, turns and careens from a neon marquee, across a dark street into the Hot Traxx discotheque. Here the camera’s roving eye introduces us to several main characters before finally coming to rest on Eddie.

“Everyone’s blessed with one special thing,” 17-year-old Eddie says proudly. Unfortunately, Eddie’s asset isn’t extremely marketable. He may be able to make a quick five bucks from someone curious enough to pay for a peek, but he’s still an underachieving drop-out to his mother. She kicks him out of the house early in the film, giving him the perfect opportunity to join up with porn director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds).

With Horner’s help, Eddie has the chance to start over. The motherly Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), who delivers an amazing performance that she can proudly add to a list of impressive roles in small films like Safe, quickly adopts Eddie as a replacement for her own lost son. Eddie quickly makes friends with the other regulars, namely Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), who helps him update his look, and Rollergirl (Heather Graham), the coy, bubble-gum-smacking nymphet who refuses to take off her skates.

Renaming himself Dirk Diggler for the biz, Eddie finally lets go of all old ties and makes an instant impression in his new job. As immediate recognition from the Adult Film Awards proves, Diggler has found his calling: he’s well-endowed, he can be gentle or rough as needed, and he will gladly reshoot a scene if the climax didn’t look right.

Like the Ed Wood of the porn industry, Horner dreams of making a masterpiece while churning out an endless supply of low-grade films. He’s so caught up in the passion that he overlooks his actors’ glaring inability to articulate lines or convey expressions other than staged orgasm. He thinks Diggler’s idea of making an action porno will legitimize his racket. “This is the film they’ll remember me by,” a satisfied Horner says of his creation, which resembles a sexploitation version of Miami Vice.

Boogie Nights stars a large cast of carefully selected and extremely talented actors. Everyone’s in the business for his own reason. Burt Reynolds could easily make a career comeback as Horner, who wants to make an artistic statement with his films. Little Bill (William H. Macy, simpering in another pathetic role) assistant-directs Horner’s movies as a way to forget that he can’t satisfy his own wife (a cameo by porn actress Nina Hartley), who cuckolds him at every opportunity. The Colonel (Robert Ridgely) finances the films to make a profit that will pay for his expensive taste in underage beauties. And Diggler wants to make a name for himself by sharing his gift with the world.

If Boogie Nights’ fairy-tale depiction (albeit an adult fairy tale) of life in the ’70s seems too easy-going, a series of revelations and unexpected events at a 1980 New Year’s Party usher in a new tone for the rest of the movie. With the new decade comes cocaine addiction and a switch from “high-quality” porn films to lower-grade videos that could spell disaster for the industry.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s captivating portrait of the glamorous ’70s adult film industry is crisp and teeming with life, but the downward trip of the ’80s becomes as confusing for us as it is for Dirk Diggler. As the characters from the first half of the movie drift apart, the story has a difficult time keeping up with them. A long series of failures are alternately comic and tragic -- compare Diggler’s hilarious attempts at trying to make it as a rock star with the bloody shootout in a donut shop. The fluidity that we have become accustomed to in the first half of the film is replaced by jumps between story lines, and bursts of violence punctuate long stretches of uneventful material. The style worked for Coppola in the Godfather trilogy but is tiresome here.

All the craziness finally reaches a brilliantly staged culmination with a sour drug deal in which Diggler and two friends find themselves cornered. Anderson throws together an over-drugged and hypothetically expendable rich guy, his firecracker-popping lover, an armed bodyguard, a batch of bad cocaine, a few loose firearms and a lot of money. We are talking a very unpleasant situation here. When the nerve-racking climax is closely followed by an inexplicable series of happy endings, we can easily tell that Anderson is trying to sew up the rather laborious chain of stories a little too neatly.

The last shot of the film reveals what we’ve all been waiting for: down goes Diggler’s zipper and out comes the film’s real star (played by a prosthesis Wahlberg wishes he could call his own). Until the end, it has been nothing but a prominent bulge in Diggler’s pants or an eyebrow-raising expression on another character’s face. Though he carefully focuses his long-running shots on other things for the majority of the movie, Anderson gives a generous helping of screen time to the final unveiling of Diggler’s oversized penis.

Anderson’s decision to use our first glimpse of Diggler’s prized possession to close the film left me feeling cheated. Is this really the reason people want to see Boogie Nights? I doubt it, even though Anderson seems to think so. Horner dreams of making a movie that will get audiences off early on, but will keep them glued to their seats until the last frame. In trying to reach a similar goal, Anderson falls for a gimmick. He builds up the importance of Diggler’s unusual endowment until our curiosity about it becomes the primary element of suspense left to carry us through the film’s last hour or so.

The NC-17 rating exists to encourage legitimate audiences who might be steered away by the awful X to see a movie like this. Even though the MPAA was hoping Boogie Nights might redeem a rating soiled by Showgirls, Anderson chickened out. Afraid that he might lose potential viewers, he cut the film down to the shorter, R-rated version.

Something was obviously lost in the process. Anderson should have shown exactly what Diggler has to offer when Rollergirl is first sent in to size him up.

By lifting the mystery, Anderson would have taken away the element that distracts his audience from what is really important. The interesting characters and talented performances are strong enough to hold us transfixed until the film ends, and Anderson should have realized it.

The current ending comes across as an insult to those who wanted to hear what Anderson had to say about the people behind pornography.

Boogie Nights is as much a tribute to the landmark movies of mainstream cinema as it is an homage to the seedier side of the film industry. Anderson takes us on a movie journey to a place we’ve never been before. Along the way, he reinvents techniques used by the masters. Critics have drawn comparisons between Boogie Nights and films by Scorcese (Raging Bull), Altman (The Player) and Tarantino (Pulp Fiction). The similarities are real, though little more than parts of a collage that frequently outperforms its ingredients. Anderson’s love for his subject is infectious, making Boogie Nights a captivating, multidimensional film that showcases the outstanding talents of a up-and-coming director and his cast of sadly undercredited actors.

If the Academy doesn’t take notice at Oscar time, maybe the Adult Film awards will.