Filmmakers, unlike artists in almost all other media, have a tendency to turn out work in which individual details are far more meaningful than the finished product. Too often, an evening spent at the movies leaves us with nothing to think about and only a few memorable scenes.

Uncut, a meandering mess of an experimental film by Lilies director John Greyson, desperately tries to escape the classic problem. You can feel Greyson trying to say something new about social conventions and to poke fun at politics and off-limits sexual subjects. Unfortunately, Greyson spends too much of his efforts digging up the most obscure topics modern culture has to offer, which means he never really gets around to saying anything meaningful.

Uncut plays as an off-the-wall pop-culture collage, combining an unpredictable surrealist story with real-life interviews. Adding to a theme of invention through borrowed artifacts, Greyson samples from music, film, news clips and erotica.

The film's narrative, a curious foray into Kafka territory with a homoerotic twist, centers on three gay men whose bizarre fetishes eventually isolate them from society. The three men, each named Peter, become completely overwhelmed by their obsessions.

Peter Cort (Matthew Ferguson) compiles a study on historical circumcision practices as part of his one-man assault on the routine practice. Convinced that Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau is a homosexual, Peter Koosens (Michael Achtman) writes him daily love letters and ends up under constant police surveillance. Peter Denham (Damon D'Oliveira) seduces both men, incorporating them into an artwork he is producing. In the process, Denham infringes on the copyrights of their private lives, so to speak.

Most viewers will find Greyson's style terminally cerebral, unnecessarily complicated and only mildly interesting. For the daring viewer, Uncut should provide an entertaining escape from familiar plots and themes. If nothing else, Greyson deserves credit for having the nerves to transform taboo subjects and overlooked ideas into the basis of a feature-length film. One of the film's interviews is especially interesting, as an art critic specializing in gay erotica explains how he was forced to alter the images in a study of nude photos he published. At his lawyers' suggestion, he grafted new faces onto the nude bodies, changing the effect of each picture in subtle, but unexpected ways (an interesting inversion of the scandal over fake celebrity nudes available online).

Uncut constantly brings up provocative points like these but doesn't do much with them. Characters may ask, for example, how circumcision evolved from being a Victorian cure for masturbation to a widely accepted medical practice, but Greyson shows no interest in the answer. Anyone enticed by the film's various themes should take this as a warning: Greyson is using the Peters' obsessions as a decoy to dismiss our tendency to be distracted by hollow crusades.

By the end, whatever message Greyson intends with his bizarre film becomes inextricably tangled in a quagmire of other details. Nevertheless, as though by accident, the idiosyncratic film leaves its audience with plenty to talk about.