ADAPTATION

1/2

Clever inside joke.

Running time: 114 minutes. Rated R (adult themes, brief violence). At the Lincoln Square, the Empire, the Sunshine.

‘ADAPTATION” is another dazzling, idea-crammed, unconventional comedy by the writer-director team responsible for “Being John Malkovich.”

Cerebral where “Malkovich” was surreal, “Adaptation” is equally funny and somehow more affecting.

That said, it’s also so insidery, it often feels as if its intended audience was the filmmakers’ Hollywood colleagues.

And there’s something unsatisfying, even irritating, about its final act, which mixes contempt for Hollywood formula with Hollywoodish sentimentality, as if the filmmakers ran out of inspiration or simply lost their nerve.

The film grew out of a failed attempt by Charlie Kaufman, screenwriter of “Being John Malkovich,” to turn Susan Orlean’s non-fiction best seller, “The Orchid Thief,” into a movie.

His efforts gradually turned into a screenplay about himself, presumably loosely fictionalized, trying to adapt Orlean’s unadaptable book.

The final result, shaped by the brilliantly nimble, pitch-perfect direction of Spike Jonze, and blessed by superb acting, is an extraordinarily clever comedy that falters only in the last 20 minutes.

Inhibited, neurotically self-loathing Charlie (Nicolas Cage) is not only suffering from an agonizing writer’s block, his personal life is a mess: He cannot bring himself even to kiss Amelia (Cara Seymour), a pretty musician who adores him.

Things seem even worse when Charlie’s identical twin brother, Donald (also Cage), crashes at his house and announces he, too, has decided to write screenplays.

A decent but superficial fellow, utterly without hang-ups about artistic integrity, Donald rapidly becomes a Hollywood success: dating gorgeous “d-girls” like Caroline (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and belching out an ultra-crass, serial-killer script with real commercial prospects.

All this is intercut with flashbacks from “The Orchid Thief,” about Orlean’s (played by Meryl Streep) life-changing encounter with toothless Florida orchid fanatic John Laroche (Chris Cooper).

In despair, with nothing to give the beautiful film executive (the riveting Tilda Swinton) who hired him, Charlie decides the solution to his writer’s block is to put himself in the script and finally to meet Orlean, whose book-jacket photograph he has become obsessed with.

Every performance here is first-rate, and Cage does his best work in years (the scenes that feature the Kaufman brothers together are a triumph of acting as well as trick photography).

Cooper is outstanding and weirdly charming as the subject of Orlean’s book, and Seymour (“Dancer in the Dark”) makes wonderful, moving use of a small role.

While “Adaptation” does break many “rules” of Hollywood screenwriting, it doesn’t take its own unconventionality too seriously.

And if what “Adaptation” has to say about the process of adaptation is less insightful than the project’s aura of smart sophistication would have you believe, the movie features what is surely the funniest and most accurate depiction of writer’s block ever.