MOVIE REVIEW

HIGH FIDELITY

1/2

The year’s first must-see. John Cusack is wonderful as a Chicago record-store owner who obsessively reviews his romantic failures in a fresh and quirky adaptation of Nick Hornby’s cult novel, directed by Stephen Frears.Running time: 114 minutes. Rated R. At the Criterion, Lincoln Square, Orpheum, others.

MOVIE critics tend to overpraise studio movies that don’t feel like the product of a marketing committee — but the quirky “High Fidelity” really deserves being called the first must-see movie of the century.

John Cusack, a gifted performer who’s one of Hollywood’s keenest judges of material, follows his triumph in “Being John Malkovich” with a quite different but only slightly less twisted comic tale of obsession — with love and popular music.

Cusack’s Rob Gordon owns Championship Vinyl, a sparsely patronized record shop where he and his staff pass most of the day compulsively compiling Top 5 lists of songs from the ’60s to the present — first cuts on first albums, songs about death, etc.

Rob’s compulsiveness only escalates when his neglected live-in girlfriend, Laura (Iben Hjejle), leaves him for a ponytailed lawyer (a priceless Tim Robbins) — and thoughtfully quotes him odds on a reconciliation (9 percent). Rob places her on his list of Top 5 breakups — “No. 5 with a bullet,” in other words, moving rapidly up the charts, in Billboard magazine’s lexicon.

Urged on by Bruce Springsteen — yes, the film-shy Boss in a movie, however briefly — in a fantasy visit, Rob decides to look up his ex-girlfriends to see why he’s been stuck in the same groove of romantic failure.

Though his recollections and re-encounters with these women — among them Lili Taylor and Catherine Zeta-Jones — are hilarious, director Stephen Frears is on to something much more interesting than a male version of the ’70s chick flick “Old Boyfriends.”

“High Fidelity” is a brilliantly modulated character study revolving around its subject — how men use their obsessions (records, movies, sports) to shield them from true intimacy — like one of Rob’s beloved discs.

Cusack, an expert in tortured romantics since “The Sure Thing,” plays Rob as petty, jealous and self-absorbed.

He’s utterly miserable and clueless about why he can’t connect with the women in his life, who also include Lisa Bonet and Natasha Gregson Wagner (in knowing cameos as a Frampton-covering wannabe-diva and a rock journalist, respectively), and real-life sister Joan Cusack as his on-screen sister.

“High Fidelity,” which has a fantastic 59-song soundtrack, falls short of four stars because of leading lady Hjejle, who can also be seen in “Mifune,” an import from her native Denmark.

She’s a beautiful and arresting presence, but she and Cusack lack chemistry together, and at times it’s painfully obvious she’s struggling with lines in a language not her own.

The real discoveries are the hulking Jack Black and pasty-faced Todd Luiso as Rob’s demented employees, a Laurel and Hardy-ish pair of music snobs who violently argue over such arcane matters as the influence of Stiff Little Fingers on Green Day.

Black, the lead singer for cult band Tenacious D, has a massive physical presence that recalls John Belushi. He expresses nothing but pity for anyone who doesn’t own an original copy of “Blonde on Blonde.”

Four writers (including Cusack and his screenwriter collaborators on “Grosse Point Blank”) are credited with this inventive adaptation of Nick Hornby’s cult novel, which was set in London.

Cusack and Frears even make the hoary device of a character directly addressing the audience seem fresh. The several fantasy sequences (particularly multiple versions of Robbins’ visit to the record store) are standouts.

“High Fidelity” is on my list of Top 5 movies for the year — with a bullet.